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.