Zuber rebounds for Hockenheim podium.

Andreas Zuber recovered from a disastrous feature race in Germany to secure a podium finish in the latest rounds of the GP2 season at Hockenheim.

The Piquet Sports driver had secured a solid third place on the grid for the opening race of the weekend but made a poor start to the race to drop down to 16th place when the lights went out to start the race. That forced the team to change its strategy in an effort to make up the lost places, with Zuber pitting to make his mandatory stop on the fifth lap.

That allowed the 24-year-old to climb up to eleventh place and he made up further places when rain started to fall and other drivers elected to pit to switch onto wet weather tyres. However, having climbed as high as fifth place, Zuber saw his bad luck return in the closing stages of the race when he went off in the rain and dropped down to eleventh place.

"I noticed during the warm-up lap that something was wrong with the clutch," he said. "At the start a sensor probably malfunctioned. Following this I tried my best and was lucky that rain set in and I moved up in the race. Unfortunately during the last lap the rainfall increased severely and the rear broke out."

That left Zuber to start the sprint race from eleventh place on the grid but this time around, he made a good start to climb up to sixth place on the first lap. Steady progress from that point on allowed him to move up to second place behind Karun Chandhok and he held on to the place despite the best efforts of Bruno Senna to find a way past.

"This was truly a super race today," he enthused. "Actually, yesterday's run had not been so bad, as well - except for the start, but today everything worked out perfectly. I tried to attack Chandhok, to make him nervous but he drove a super race and didn't make the tiniest mistake. Since my tyres had already started to wear off, I mainly focused on keeping Senna behind me in the end. We made a giant leap forward with the team which makes me very confident for the next run."