Nico Rosberg may have joined an exclusive club of F1 drivers who turned their maiden pole into a maiden win, but accepts that that success will not be a guarantee of more in the races to come.
Being sat beside
Jenson Button in the post-race press conference will remind the young German that, despite having had to wait a similar number of races to find the top step of the podium - Button took 113 races to Rosberg's 111 - the Briton went another couple of seasons before returning to winning ways, before then embarking on his championship-winning 2009 campaign.
While he was planning a quick celebration before heading off to Bahrain for round four of the season, Rosberg admitted that he wasn't going to head into the Sakhir race expecting to be at the front.
"It's an unbelievable feeling - very, very cool," he smiled, "I'm very happy, very excited. It's been a long time coming for me, and for the team as well, over the past two years and a bit. Now, it's finally here. It's just amazing and it's just nice to see how quickly we are now progressing. I didn't expect to be that fast today - I expected that we had a good chance to be in front, but I was very happy today with the pace I was able to go in the race.
"Big thanks to the whole team, because all the engineers - especially in the past few weeks - have been working very, very hard, as everybody else has, just improving the set-up, because we really struggled in the first two races with race pace. Today, it all came good, and it's great to see just how quickly we managed to progress but, for sure, we're still not where we want to be in the race.
"I had a great race today, but that doesn't mean it's going to be like that at every race. We still need to push hard and continue progressing. Bahrain could be a little bit of a different story again. We need to wait and see. It's difficult to predict. I couldn't have predicted today, so we'll just take it as it comes, but for sure I'm looking forward to what's to come because we're looking much stronger."
While Mercedes' qualifying potential, aided by its controversial take on the DRS system, has never been in doubt, the W03's appetite for tyres and the limit on DRS usage on raceday had been expected to count against it, even from pole position. However, the Three-Pointed Star confounded expectation by opting for a strategy that required fewer pit-stops than its rivals, and saw Rosberg come home 20 seconds clear of Button.
"Of course, I was a bit careful [after qualifying] because, yes, we were on pole, but we've seen good qualifying performances all along this year and we've had more difficulties on high fuel in the race, so I wasn't really sure what to expect," he admitted, "It's never perfect, but it definitely felt very good out there. It's never easy, and taking care of the tyres was a big difficulty and a big challenge today because there was a lot of tyre wear, but it worked out well.
"I think we got it all right, even tyre strategy. We have a lot of competence in the team, which is fantastic. Before the race, [two stops] was our plan. Of course, you have Plan B if things don't go well, but things progressed exactly as we had hoped for. The tyres lasted for exactly the amount of laps that we were hoping for, so it just all went to plan."