Piquet aims to build on maiden points

The Renault driver finished a career-best seventh after a strong drive and is confident his luck has changed.

"Hopefully it will be a snowball now just getting bigger for the rest of the year," said Piquet. "Sooner or later it was going to arrive - I never felt under pressure.

"Obviously everything needs to be better than in the first part of the championship. I was very unlucky, a lot of bad things happened, but hopefully everything will be good from now on."

Piquet turned in by far the best race of his F1 career - keeping Lewis Hamilton, who was on a lighter fuel load - at bay in the early stages.

Despite a small mistake exiting the pits after his first stop, which allowed McLaren's Heikki Kovalainen to pass him, he was happy with his race.

"It was a race where I had to push 99% of the time. I didn't have much traffic in front of me and it was good in the beginning holding the McLarens behind me.

"Unfortunately there was a little problem on the exit of the pits when my hand slipped onto the neutral button which cost me a couple of seconds."

Piquet was also pleased to have capitalised on teammate Fernando Alonso's mistake at the hairpin, when he ran wide on lap 68.

"It wasn't really a fight," said Piquet. "He made a tiny mistake and I got an advantage. I had a perfect strategy - maybe a little bit better than Fernando's."