The Swiss driver, running on a 3-stop tyre strategy was overwhelmed at the end by the two Lotus-Renaults of Nick Heidfeld and Vitaly Petrov, but stayed 8.7 seconds clear at the chequered flag clear of Sauber's Kamui Kobayashi (also running on a 3-stop strategy) who had fought his way up the order after starting from the back of the grid.

Ninth place in Turkey yesterday delivered two more world championship points and ended a two race barren streak for the Red Bull-owned team from Faenza in Italy, to add to the four points it scored in Melbourne. That puts Scuderia Torro Rosso into seventh place in the constructors' championship standing after four races, now on six points, two points behind the similarly Ferrari-powered Sauber team and two points ahead of Force India-Mercedes. Buemi, who also scored the points in Australia, moves onto six points but remains in twelfth place in the drivers standings, now on equal points with Mercedes' Michael Schumacher.

Team mate Jaime Alugersuari in the sister Ferrari V8-engined SRT6 single-seater had a more distant race from his midfield starting slot: he finished sixteen, sandwiched by the two Williams' of Rubens Barrichello and Pastor Maldonado, finishing just 0.1 seconds behind the Brazilian. The Spaniard is yet to get off the points mark this year.

Sebastien Buemi (STR6-02) Pos. 9th

“In general I am very happy with my race and I don’t think I could have done better. However, it’s true that in the final two laps I lost two places and if not for this we could have brought home a seventh place finish. But I could not even hold the steering wheel anymore because there was so much vibration coming through from the tyres: it was not due to tyre wear, so we will have to analyse carefully what happened as I had not felt this before. All the same, it was a great race and I pulled off plenty of overtaking moves and I fought hard. Scoring points after starting sixteenth is reason to be pleased. We decided to do only three pit stops, although it was clear that here it did not cost that much time to make a pit stop so that was an interesting situation. We are continuing to develop the car and have more parts coming which I hope can keep us fighting for points in the next few races.”

“As usual, I did my best, pushing hard from the beginning. But I suffered a lot from degradation on the rear tyres, especially in the final stint. This meant I had a massive amount of oversteer, which is why I really had to come in for an additional fourth stop for fresh tyres towards the end. I don’t understand why my team-mate suffered much less than me in this respect, so we need to look at all the data to find out why. The next race is in Barcelona, which is obviously very important for me as it’s my home race. I have many good memories from there, including scoring points there last year.”