Home boy, Oscar Piastri is delighted as he and his team finally open their 2023 points account.

Though not exactly of zero to hero proportions, today's result, sixth for Lando Norris and eighth for Oscar Piastri elevated McLaren from tenth to fifth in the standings.

An eventful afternoon, much of which spent behind Yuki Tsunoda, ended with the Australian driver finishing ninth on the road, then being promoted as a result of the time penalty handed to Carlos Sainz.

"Obviously it’s not been a great first two races for the whole team, largely things out of our control,” he admitted. “Some more things out of our control went right today, I guess, to get us into the points. But to get this amount of points this early in the year is obviously something we needed; to get points on the board.

“We’ve got some upgrades coming in Baku and later through the year," he continued. “But to get the points on the board with the car that we have at the moment is really good.

"I'm definitely happy to get my first points on the board, especially here at home,” he smiled. “But what a crazy race. I think that’s the first race I’ve had that’s had three red flags, I think it’s probably most people’s first race like that.

“So yeah, we kept ourselves out of trouble and end up in the points at the end, which is great.

“The first race two races really couldn’t have gone that much worse," he admitted, "obviously Bahrain we both had our issues, in Saudi contact wiping out both of us. So it was nice to be on the good end of other things going wrong with other people!”

Asked about a clash with Tsunoda at one of the restarts, he said: “I think it was a bit of a bit of a squeeze, but no harm done."

Check out our Sunday gallery from Melbourne here.