Felipe Massa didn't let his second place grid position stop him from dominating Sunday's Grand Prix of Bahrain.
Massa overtook pole sitter Robert Kubica at the start of the race and didn't look back, capturing his second consecutive victory in the desert.
It was the first points finish for the young Ferrari driver this season, and it propelled him to fourth in the standings. In the first two races of the season, Massa posted rare DNFs.
His teammate Kimi Raikkonen was able to overcome BMW's Kubica on the third lap to finish second Sunday.
Raikkonen now holds the top spot in the points after McLaren's Lewis Hamilton was knocked out of the points leader role with a non-points finish of 13th at Bahrain.
"I messed up at the start as I didn't hit the switch early enough and therefore had not engaged the correct engine setting, and the anti-stall kicked in. I lost a lot of places but things were still salvageable at that point," Hamilton said of the race. "Then I had the incident with Fernando. I was behind him, and I moved to the right, and he moved to the right and that was it - a racing incident I guess.
"I have had such a good run in Formula One until now, and it was almost inevitable that at some point things would go wrong. However there is a long way to go in the championship and I intend to win it."
This was the worst finish for the Brit where he was running at the end. In his rookie season last year, Hamilton only finished without points on two occasions, a ninth-place finish at the Nurburgring from 10th on the grid and a 19th-place finish in China as a result of mechanical failure.
Hamilton is now involved in a three-way tie for third place with Kubica and teammate Heikki Kovalainen.
Kubica's teammate Nick Heidfeld sits in second, three points behind Raikkonen, after he and Kubica combined again to give BMW its best race finish to date.
BMW has consistently proven itself over the last three races, with Kubica's third-place finish Sunday and Heidfeld's fourth putting them in the lead for the Constructor's Championship.
Surprisingly Sunday, there were no major accidents as seen in the opener in Australia. Many had supposed heading into Sunday's race that the sandy circuit could prove to be the downfall of the drivers as they ran their first race there without assisted traction control.
There were only three retirements in the race, two as a result of mechanical failure and one as a result of accident damage.
Jenson Button suffered an accident that took him out of the race when he tried unsuccessfully to pass Red Bull's David Coulthard. Button was out after that, while Coulthard limped to an 18th-place finish.
Hamilton was involved in a slight 'fender-bender' with ex-teammate Fernando Alonso that helped lead to Hamilton's disappointing result and Alonso's 10th-place effort.
The McLaren driver got into the back of Alonso's Renault in the early laps of the race.
Two veterans were able to capitalize on the mistake of Hamilton to finish in the points for the second straight race. Toyota's Jarno Trulli finished sixth while Red Bull's Mark Webber posted his second straight seventh-place finish. Nico Rosberg rounded out the points finishers in eighth.
The series will now have a three-week break before its first race on the European continent. The Grand Prix of Spain is next on April 27.
