Leclerc: ‘The best recovery in my career’

Charles Leclerc has said that after Friday’s problems, to qualify in P8 for the French Grand Prix is the “best recovery” of his entire career.

The Monegasque driver, who is in his rookie year in F1, qualified in P8, the highest a Sauber has qualified in almost three years.

The team struggled on Friday, but Leclerc could not quite believe what he managed to do on Saturday afternoon.

“It is just unbelievable. It is probably the best recovery I did in my career from one day to another,” Leclerc told Sky Sports. “Yesterday was a disaster. The car didn’t feel great and I was not driving very well.”

Leclerc said that he had a late night, in his attempts to help improve the car, saying that the car was completely different from Friday.

“I went to bed very late because I worked quite a lot with the engineers to find out what were the issues and I think they have been very good to identify the exact issues and they understood really what I wanted from the car and that is what we did today,” the rookie continued.

The Sauber driver has scored points in three of the last four races, and is in a wonderful position to do so again, but he says it will be a tough ask.

“It is going to be a very difficult race for us because by the rule we have to start with our qualifying tyre which are the softest ones which are not great for us,” he added. “So it is going to be difficult but we are going to try and maximise and hopefully we can get some points.”