Comment: Luck and patience powered Brendon Hartley's Formula 1 point

Brendon Hartley during the Azerbaijan Formula One Grand Prix at Baku City Circuit. Photo / Getty Images

Brendon Hartley secured his first championship point in this morning's Azerbaijan Grand Prix but luck played a significant role.

The Kiwi drove a smart race, kept his nose clean as others got caught up in incidents and banked a valuable point at a venue where he really wasn't expecting to be contending in his Toro Rosso Honda.

Hartley becomes the first New Zealander to score a Formula 1 championship point since Chris Amon in 1976.

The result is a huge boost for the 28-year-old, who has made a couple of errors this season that have proven costly and robbed him the chance of banking points. He also made a mistake in qualifying on Sunday that nearly resulted in a major incident and forced him to start near the back of the grid.

He inherited a number of positions as other cars ran into trouble in front of him. A first lap incident saw two cars retire from the race. Towards the end of the race the two Red Bulls came together in a clumsy piece of driving that put both out of the race. Then Romain Grosjean inexplicably lost control of his Haas behind the safety car.

With the race set to go green for the final four laps, Hartley was still outside the point scoring positions but picked up a couple of places when teammate Pierre Gasly and the Haas of Kevin Magnussen made contact on the re-start in front of him.

His reward for staying out of harm's way was a maiden championship point and it came on a track where he maybe wouldn't have expected to be that competitive.

The Toro Rosso has struggled at circuits with long straights – it loses out to rival cars in straight-line speed and that is the focus of Honda's next power unit upgrade, due in a couple of races.

The Baku street circuit features a near 2km long front straight and the Toro Rosso was gobbled up by rivals all weekend so to come away with a maiden point will be a big boost.

The best guide of a Formula 1 driver is how he places compared to his teammate. So far this year Hartley has been out-driven by the impressive Gasly. The former GP2 champion grabbed a superb fourth place in Bahrain and looks to have better one-lap speed than the Kiwi on the whole.

Gasly is a genuine talent and could well become a regular race winner in the seasons to come so it is no easy feat to better him this early in Hartley's Formula 1 career.

The New Zealander is clearly helping the team improve their package and has shown signs of being competitive at this extremely high level. He should take some confidence from this result and that can only bode well.

The other thing to note about the first few races of this season is that Toro Rosso and Honda have found some reliability, which wasn't there at the back end of 2017.

That makes results like this morning's possible.