Toro Rosso vindicated by Buemi decision

Marko has revealed that he had to fight hard to convince sceptics within the energy drinks company that Buemi was good enough to make the step up from GP2.

But in the wake of Buemi's run to seventh place in Australia, Marko says he has nothing but praise for the efforts of the youngster.

"I have to say, all weekend he didn't do anything wrong," Marko told AUTOSPORT. "He had big pressure in the race to keep [Nico] Rosberg behind. I'm really pleased because he is the youngest driver and he is another to come out of our programme.

"I had to fight very hard to put him in the car. All the experts know that I made the right choice."

Buemi himself has hit out at those who doubted he was good enough to follow in the footsteps of Sebastian Vettel at Toro Rosso.

"The people who say this don't understand anything about racing," he said. "If you look at the car we had last year in GP2, and the comparison with my teammate, I was a lot better. Now being in F1, everyone knows what a Toro Rosso can do, and I could do the job."

Buemi added that finishing in the points was as much as the team could have hoped for, considering how late its car hit the track.

"We got points and we couldn't have dreamed of doing better than that," he said. "I'm very happy with the result; and with what the team did as we didn't make any mistakes.

"The objective was to finish the race and to finish it in the points was more than we could have expected. We knew there had to be some accidents. Without those we couldn't do it, but it was perfect."