Lewis Hamilton has admitted that personal problems were the reason he couldn’t put his all into securing his second world title during the 2010 season.
The McLaren driver told the BBC’s Radio One that ‘personal intrusions’ had hampered his performance, but the Brit didn’t go into details, although many believe the split with his father-manager may be one of the significant issues.
“The personal life, the way things have gone have not been as smooth and as happy as they could have been in the past and to do what I do is a combination of many, many things that are surrounding you,” he said in the interview.
“It’s not just arriving at the race track and driving, it’s your appearances, it’s your mood swings, it’s the people that are around you — your family and your friends — and the time that you are able to give to them and the relationship that you have with them.
“As soon as some of those things are off — and you’ve not got all those pieces of the puzzle in place — then it makes it very hard to do other aspects of your life as easily. The key I think to life is getting all those pieces of the puzzle in place.”
Despite this, the 2008 world champion is determined to smooth over these issues in readiness for the 2011 season.
“My plan right now is to smooth everything off and make sure that next year I am 100 percent clear in my mind and have no outside intrusions mentally.”
Talking about his failure to secure the title this year, he added: “It’s been a long time since I finished out of the top three of a championship in my career. Finishing fourth is not something that I’m not particularly proud of.
“We had a solid couple of bad races where I lost points which would have put me in a much stronger position to compete for the championship at the end of the year and really just throughout the year in general,” he concluded.
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