Charles Leclerc praised Sauber for its efforts to recover from a ‘disastrous’ Friday after qualifying a career-best eighth on the grid for the French Grand Prix, labelling it the “best recovery” of his career.

Leclerc continued his impressive run of form in qualifying as he gave the Swiss outfit its first Q3 appearance since the 2015 Italian Grand Prix, posting the eighth fastest time of the session to line up on the fourth row of the grid.

The Monegasque driver admitted Friday had not gone as planned, with the car not handling to his liking, but hailed his mechanics work to address the issues they had been toying with overnight.

“It’s probably the best recovery I did in my career,” Leclerc told Sky F1. “Yesterday was a disaster. The car didn’t feel great, I was not driving very well.

“We changed the car completely and I felt a lot better. We all should be proud, the team and I, for what we achieved today.

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“I went to bed very late because I worked a lot with the engineers to find out what were the issues. [Mechanics] have been very good to identify what were the exact issues.

“They understood what I wanted from the car, we did all the right things and I’m extremely happy.”

Leclerc made it into Q3 on the ultra-soft tyre meaning he will start the race on the softest of the three tyre compounds for this event. The 20-year-old is wary this could disadvantage the team in its effort to score points.

“It’s going to be a very difficult race for us,” he added. “By the rule, we need to start with our qualifying tyre – which are the softest ones.

“That’s not great for us. We’ll try to maximise and hopefully we can get some points.”