Christian Lundgaard says that his ART Grand Prix team were baffled by their struggles during the Feature Race on Saturday and praised them for getting to the bottom of the issue in time for the Sprint Race on Sunday.

With the problem resolved, Lundgaard was free to unleash his full potential and charged through the field from 19th, all the way to sixth.

“The front anti-roll bar broke on the second lap of the race,” Lundgaard explained. “That meant that I had a lot more front than anticipated, which made it very difficult to save the rears.

“I was very confused yesterday and we didn’t figure the problem out until the de-brief. It was quite difficult, and I was very confused, because the car was the opposite of what we had in Practice and Quali.

“The changes we made would never have made that big a difference. I was very surprised and I didn't understand what was going on, so I was really pleased that we were able to find out the issue and sort it.”

Yuki Tsunoda had already proven in the Feature Race that a charge through the field was possible at Sakhir, roaring from last to sixth, and Lundgaard says that he was able to take inspiration from the Carlin driver.

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“Today was a pretty good race, but we shouldn't have started where we did,” he continued. “The result proves that we weren't really supposed to be there yesterday - Marcus (Armstrong) proved that by being at the front as well.

“I am very happy with the recovery that we did today, I didn't expect to go as far forward as we did. I knew it was possible, looking at what Yuki did yesterday, but he had the pit stop. In a straight race, to go from 19th to 6th, I am very happy.”

With one round of the season to go, Lundgaard has fallen to sixth in the drivers’ standings, but remains just 10 points off Robert Shwartzman in fourth and only 13 off Nikita Mazepin in third.

Asked if he was thinking about the Championship battle, he said: “I need to produce, it’s as simple as that.

“If we can manage to forget Saturday’s result and just be happy with what we did today and the practice session that we did, then I think we can do good next weekend. We made progress this weekend, but it needs to be extraordinarily good to really move up.”