Carlos Sainz's first podium with Williams in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix was vindication of his decision to join the team for the 2025 Formula 1 season.
But even he was taken aback by the level of satisfaction the result delivered him after his wild celebrations in parc ferme.
"I cannot describe how happy I am, how good this feels," he said. "This is even better than my first ever podium that I did."
What made it especially sweet was that the journey to get there had not been straightforward, as things have repeatedly not been clicking for Sainz this season.
Bad luck, poor reliability, mistakes from team and driver, plus getting involved in other peoples' incidents, had all culminated to leave him with just 16 points to his name from the first 16 races. This was well behind team-mate Alex Albon's tally of 70.
In such a scenario, where it seemed Sainz just could not get a break to unlock a clean weekend, it would have been all too easy to let frustration creep into the system and have that then open up a whole new world of pain.
For Williams team principal James Vowles, the situation was not at a crisis point, but he felt ahead of the Baku weekend that perhaps things needed a bit of a lift. So the pair agreed to go for a dinner in Baku on Thursday night to lay everything on the table in a bid to get things back on track. And it seemed to work.
Vowles told The Race: "He and I have a really good relationship where we talk really candidly and openly about what's going on, what's going wrong, and what's going right? And how do we capitalise on it together?
"And the real key is this. His performance has always been there. If you didn't have performance, this becomes really tough, and it's really hard to put one thing on, 'This has happened', because so many things have across the season.
"We had dinner here on Thursday, which was basically a reset point of: 'What do we do going forward? How can I help? And how do we do this?'
"Carlos was in a great place at that point. And I'm not surprised he came into this weekend swinging, because that was the mood that he had from the outset."
As Vowles mentioned, the one consolation that both he and Sainz shared over the early-season annoyances was that the lack of results was not down to a lack of speed.
So they both knew that when the right moment came the turnaround would be instant.
As Sainz said: "I didn't have results to prove to myself, the team, and everyone that some good things were about to come. But, in the end, they did.
"Life has taught me many times that this sometimes happens: that you have a run of misfortune or bad performances, but then suddenly life gives you back if you keep working hard with something really sweet like this."
The 'lucky bastard' message
Straight after Sainz took that podium finish, beating Kimi Antonelli to third, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff dispatched a celebratory gift of champagne and chocolates to Vowles.
On the bag he cheekily wrote "lucky bastard" - a tongue-in-cheek reference to how Sainz had been in the right place at the right time in the chaotic qualifying session that ended with him on the front row.
Vamos, @WilliamsRacing