After a terrible weekend in Australia, that saw heavy crashes for both drivers, Aston Martin bounced back in Italy with points finishes for both drivers in Imola. With Sebastian Vettel, a four time World Champion, saying that finishing eighth felt like a race victory it does show how tough the 2022 season has been for the team.

"This feels like a victory." said Vettel. "We are not the fastest at the minute but we did really well to finish eighth. The weekend heloed us with the conditions, but we managed to capitalize. I think we did a great job on calling for the dry tyres at the right time and everybody else then I think copied what we did. So I was happy to go even a lap before or two. So yeah, it was really, really good.'

When you are down on performance strategy becomes critical and the tyre switch helped Vettel but the German still needed to take advantage of the performance improvement offered by dry weather tyres on the drying track surface.

"Eighth position is not as enjoyable as winning." continued Vettel. "But to be honest I've driven a lot of races where I finished on the podium and I've done a worse race. So I'm very happy."

For the team manager, Mike Krack, the boost in morale of scoring points is critical but he knows that there is still lots of work to be done to be more competitive.

"I don't think that there is now more pace in the car than what we saw previously," assessed Krack. "If you look at the sprint race we were having to defend hard. There was no chance we were going to finish in the top 10 in that race but all in all, I'm satisfied with the first points of the season. We have a long way to go, obviously. So we'll smile for today and work hard for tomorrow."

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