Marco Andretti rebounded from his involvement in the start line shunt in the sprint race to secure a podium finish for Team USA in the third round of the A1GP season at Sepang.

In his second outing with the team, Andretti was one of three drivers forced to retire at the start of the sprint race after the field was backed up by the front-runners, with Andretti running into the rear of Narain Karthikeyan and Felipe Guimaraes also making contact with the rear of the Indian car.

"You can say its unavoidable but at the time I thought everyone was going and I could only see two rows ahead of me,” Andretti admitted of the race-ending shunt. “I couldn't see ahead of the whole field. I was about to grab fourth gear, and as soon as rear tires were hooking up, that was needed to stop the car.

“There was no hope. In the States you either go or you don't. Here, they went and then stopped. No one was to blame, it was just racing. But ultimately I crashed out two cars."

With the Andretti Green Racing-run team having repaired the extensive damage done to the car in time for the feature race, Andretti was able to make up places to fourth and when miscommunication in the Malaysian squad saw Fairuz Faurzy put when he didn't need to, Andretti moved up into a third place he would hold to the flag.

"The start was a bit of survival and I used the PowerBoost when everybody was close together and we needed the track position,” he said. “The boys did a good job in the pits and then we weren't threatened from behind, but I had nothing on these guys in front so I was just enjoying the car and Sepang. It's a great circuit."