MPH: Mark Hughes on...

So what's going on with Lewis Hamilton at the moment?

After his untypically error-strewn Bahrain Grand Prix he hung around long enough only to berate himself to the press. Then it was into a waiting car and off - as far away from that damn track as possible, away from the questions. Because he had no answers. Not even for his engineers. Heikki Kovalainen was the sole McLaren driver at the team's post-race debrief. It wasn't so much a prima-donna flounce as the emotion-skewed perspective of someone who felt he'd let everyone down and had no explanations to give.

For whatever reason, Hamilton's head is in a strange place right now. He's a shadow of the supremely relaxed guy who turned up in Melbourne and dominated. You're only as good as your car and at Sepang and Sakhir the McLaren was not the force it had been at Albert Park. But his apparent reaction to that has been baffling.

His responses to certain questions have been obtuse, hinting at upheaval in his world. His error in not arming the launch programme on the Bahrain grid was just one of many little mistakes he made through the weekend, like his mind was elsewhere.

In Saturday practice, he made a big lock-up into turn 10, the downhill entry into a hairpin. No big deal, fairly typical of what all drivers were doing as they sought to find the limit on a track with a strong crosswind at a place where the car is naturally unbalanced. But his reaction to it was unusual and untypical. After gathering it up, he exited the turn in a rubber-burning display of anger; totally pointless and indicative of something less than cool calm in the cockpit.

This followed on from his car-destroying Friday practice accident. The team was running the car very low, maximising the downforce, it got onto the kerb and effectively became a skateboard. There was no coming back from there. It was simply a big penalty for a small mistake. But it coloured his approach to the rest of the weekend. He wanted to get quickly away from that very visible failure, refused to look it in the eye, had to be made by the team to visit the medical centre for the compulsory check-up after an impact beyond a certain g-loading.

A fascinating mind game

Sitting on the grid, his entire focus was on how to handle turns one/two/three/four, where there's so much potential for passing on the first lap, how to handle Felipe Massa and Robert Kubica, thinking about what they might do, how he would react. In the midst of all this he forgot to arm his start programme. His recovery was compromised by the team not having briefed him that any software changes could not be made for four seconds once the car was stationary.

Motor racing is a fascinating mind game and these things can feed on themselves. The frustration at things not going the way you want them to can easily lead to you doing the very things that deepen the problem and it becomes a vicious circle. It's the same in any competitive endeavour.

Much of it is to do with your entry point into an event. Taking Melbourne as an example, Lewis, arrived fresh from some very encouraging testing performances, in a part of the world that carries its own special feel-good factor. When he found the McLaren then dialled into the demands of the place, it was easy to go with the flow and relax into his talent.

He hit the ground running, and not because he'd done anything special to get that momentum. Circumstance largely dictated it was there - and Hamilton's ability enabled him to plug right into it and disappear up the road, able to handle anything thrown at him. Such weekends are not about application, but being able to accept a gift.

A crucial trick the experienced competitor learns is to take such weekends and appreciate them for what they are. Circumstances outside your control have conspired to make things easy for you, to give you the outside factors that trigger your best stuff. Go with it, be attuned to when it's happening. But don't assume you'll stay on top of that wave. Because you won't - and if you're expecting to be riding the wave when actually you've been dumped in the shallows, you will perform badly.

These more difficult weekends are all about application, method and calm, a very different discipline from that of riding the wave. Trying to use the approach that worked so beautifully last time is akin to trying to get back into a beautiful dream you've awoken from. You won't get back into it, it's time to begin constructing a new one, hoping it will eventually take you to such highs again sometime in the future.

Knowing how to lose

Lewis has spoken in the past of how one of the key things he has learned since his junior racing career is how to lose. He says that, but it's almost as if he's repeatedly trying to get himself to believe it. Knowing how to lose is about that rebuilding process, that methodical grind of getting yourself in the ballpark. Only then are you ever going to be able to catch a wave. Being angry with yourself for no longer being on a wave will only delay your rebuild.

There have been several examples in Hamilton's career. In the first half of his second season of Formula Renault he was the fastest thing around - but the results weren't coming. So he'd put on his new tyres and go out intent on finding 1sec. When they were worth only 0.3sec he'd go off or overdrive his way over the top of the ultimate lap time - and then try even harder.

His talent is so big it must be very tempting to believe you can use it to pull yourself back from anything. Because sometimes he can. So because he's done it sometimes, he feels he can rely on it. But it's not to be relied upon - its success depends on a conspiracy of outside factors over which you have no control. Sometimes the shortfall is just enough that a special talent can breach the gap. Other times it's simply too big for that.

Kimi Raikkonen recognises this. Did you see him get flustered at being off the pace of team-mate Felipe Massa in Bahrain? It would have been very easy to, but Kimi's temperament and experience allowed a space in his head for Massa being quicker on the day, without it destabilising him. Inwardly he will be confident he can handle him over a season. Better to preserve that inner conviction than risk losing it through getting into a spiral of over-striving.

Felipe will have felt great about his Bahrain weekend of course - but he will have noted also how unperturbed Kimi was about it all. For anyone not totally secure about their standing, that in itself could plant doubts in their mind: why isn't he more hacked off I beat him? What does he know?

Meantime Heikki Kovalainen just goes cleanly about his job. We've not yet seen anything inspirational from him in the McLaren, but he hasn't put a foot wrong.

He turns up, tunes in, builds up the momentum of his weekend, applies himself, all the while attuned to recognising when one of those special days might come along, when he will be able to run with it, when the others will become bit-part players in his perfect weekend. Seeing all the calm and productive application on the other side of the garage is probably yet another irritant in Lewis's world right now.