Lifestyle helps me deal with setbacks - Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton believes his busy lifestyle away from racing helps him deal with setbacks in F1.

The defending champion has a hectic personal schedule, often travelling to the United States between races and committing time to other passions such as music and fashion.

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Hamilton has had a testing start to the 2016 season, with reliability problems forcing him to start from the back of the grid in China and from 10th in Russia. Despite having yet to win a race this season, Hamilton - speaking before finishing second in Sochi - believes having such a busy personal life away from F1 helps him bounce back from a difficult weekend.

“I think in life if you have a difficult experience and then you go and lock yourself in a room and you don’t have anything else to occupy your brain but to think of that and what’s just happened, that’s not healthy at all," Hamilton said.

"So is it good that I get to go and do other things? Absolutely. As soon as I’ve finished the race I stop thinking about it, I switch off…

"I mean I was in the factory on Tuesday [before Russia] where I put a lot of energy into it and then during the week, receiving and sending emails with my engineers, so I am studying bit by bit but in my own time and on the flight here ... And then when you arrive at the weekend that’s when you know, it’s that week, it’s that week, meaning you start to put all of the energy into it so maybe that’s part of it, maybe it’s also shrugging off… Like you do care but you don’t care, you don’t worry about it.”

Hamilton is currently 43 points behind team-mate Nico Rosberg in the championship standings, with Rosberg having won the opening four races as part of a sequence of seven straight victories stretching back to last year's Mexican Grand Prix.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.