A beaming Sebastian Vettel has explained where he felt the key to his success was as the German driver finished in second place from an 11th place grid slot. Vettel had great pace throughout the race, running a long first stint after looking after his starting soft tyres, and slowly climbed the order to finish on the podium. "I think it means a great deal, obviously it's been a tough start for us," Vettel smiled after the race, when asked how much the return to the podium meant for the former Racing Point outfit. "I think it was a great race, we had good pace, that was the key obviously we had a good start, made some positions straight away then looked after my tyres. "As soon as everybody went into the pits, I'd really good pace to overcut, you can see the restart worked brilliantly for me. And, yeah, I mean, we obviously have fresher tyres which I guess helped warming up the tires later on so, yeah, great day, I mean, I'm over the moon." Having barely missed out on Q3 after missing out on a chance to finish his final run in Q2, it turned out to be a stroke of luck as Vettel had fresh soft tyres for the final two sprint from a standing start. Starting third, he jumped to second as Lewis Hamilton made an error at Turn 1. "I think this is great obviously a podium we didn't expect that when we came here, but, already on Friday, even though we were nowhere, it felt good. I was quite relaxed and yesterday we didn't quite get it but today [is] even sweeter," Vettel explained. "It's always better to start further up but the new tyre for sure didn't hurt because other people had a couple of laps on from qualifying so it helped us to go longer but we really preserved the tyres well and I think that was the secret plus the pace that we had, I think, in the race and the car felt good and that was the key to keep progressing and move forward."
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