Ferrari F1 protege Marciello says his GP2 season starts now

The reigning European Formula 3 champion moved up to GP2 for 2014 with the Racing Engineering team that took Fabio Leimer to last year's title, but various misfortunes in the early races meant his best finish before the Red Bull Ring event was 12th in the Monaco feature.

In Austria he was able to turn his pace into a result at last with combative third place finishes in both races.

"We showed how competitive we can be. I'm happy about this," said Marciello.

"As for the drivers' standings, I'm something like 11th so I'm not really looking at it. I don't care about it.

"Now I'm aiming at finishing in the top five every race so I can recover the points I lost in the beginning."

Marciello is 92 points behind series leader Jolyon Palmer with 14 rounds remaining.

He hopes he has now got all his incidents for the year out of the way and will be able to show his pace consistently even if his title hopes are already over.

"We had really bad races before so it's good for me and the team to score a lot of good points," said the 19-year-old Italian.

"I think my championship starts now.

"During the first few races, we almost had everything [go wrong] and it was a good experience. Now we show that we are fast.

"We're already on the fourth round. The championship goes quickly. We had a bad start of the season, but I think we can recover as early as Silverstone."