Just days after Lewis Hamilton's father, Anthony, claimed that his son "kills drivers", getting inside their minds to beat them from within as well as on the race track, Nico Rosberg has revealed the lengths he went to in order to beat his Mercedes teammate and why he subsequently chose to call 'time' on his F1 career.

"I am turning my life upside down, so it will be full of challenges," he tells the Daily Mail. "The underlying belief, however, is that it felt totally right. I am following my heart.

"Now I am excited because of all the freedom I have," he continues. "When I was racing I was in a hamster wheel, a good one, of course, and I am so thankful for everything it gave me. I wouldn't do anything differently. But to be the best in your sport you have to make a lot of compromises.

"Now I look at my calendar for March and it's totally blank from start to finish," he says, referring to a time his rivals will be testing and preparing for the start of the new season. "I can decide to explore whatever I want to. It's about spending more time with my family, which last year was a serious shortcoming.

"It's learning to play the guitar. You need to be in one place for a while to be with your teacher and get into a rhythm. That's a ridiculous, small example. There are bigger things, too: I have received so much in my life: the world championship, my family. I'm exploring what I want to do, maybe something with kids, 10-year-olds, an age where I can make a difference."

But to get to this place, first he had to beat a man who he had failed to beat - certainly over the course of a whole season - for as long as anyone can remember, a driver destined to be talked about in the same breath as some of the other greats of the sport... Lewis Hamilton.

Rosberg admits that in order to take on Hamilton a more intense training programme was called for, not just for the body but for the mind, and to prevent the Briton getting even further inside his head he even avoided Facebook for several months.

"There was a good mind man up the road and I spoke to him," he admits. "I read books on philosophy. You know if you woke this morning and felt bad, some genius, maybe 2,000 years ago, had experienced the same and wrote about it. You can learn from this why you are feeling jealous or angry or stressed. And if you understand it, you can address it and deal with it.

"I would spend twenty minutes each morning and evening meditating," he reveals. "I don't like that word, actually, it's about concentration and awareness practice. I would sit down and just think of my thoughts, learning to relax my mind. After twenty times, your mind calms. When the fear crept in that I would lose the championship, you connect with the thought and have a discussion with it. Then the negative thought loses its strength."

More often than not, that anger was linked to the man across the garage.

"That's right," he admits. "The anger is bigger if that person you know so well does something that crosses the line. Lewis is very good at going to the edge without going outside the grey area, thanks to his skills in the car. He is smart, very, very smart. I found it harder to go wheel-to-wheel. For him, it comes naturally.

"For me it is more rational. I have to work at standing my ground. I got more aggressive because too often in the past he had walked all over me. I had to watch the videos and make improvements.

"I stopped cycling in the summer to lose one kilo," he reveals. "The next race I was on pole in Suzuka by one hundredth of a second. One kilo is worth three hundredths per lap. So I was on pole thanks to losing my leg muscles. It got me the win. Those were the small details I went into."

It was around Suzuka time that he first began to seriously consider retiring, should he win the title, and while his wife, Vivian, didn't put any pressure on him, Rosberg was concerned that he was missing out in terms of his baby daughter, Alaia.

"Vivian did absolutely everything," he admits. "If our daughter needed something, Vivian would be there. Never, ever, did I do a tough moment with my daughter. I was working on beating jet-lag by moving to the time zone - I was going in one-and-a-half-hour stages per day. It meant I could be asleep into the afternoon and living at night. It was horrible. Alaia knew Daddy couldn't be disturbed. She was so impregnated with the concept that whenever she came to the bedroom she had her finger over her mouth and said, "shush". Now I am doing those tough moments. It creates a bonding. She gives the love back to you. It's amazing that she knows when you are suffering with her."

Now, as the drivers continue the preparations for the new season and the gruelling months that follow, Rosberg can finally relax having achieved his mission impossible.

"I never wanted to emulate my Dad as such and thought that having done so I would draw a line under my career," he says. "I am glad we can share in having accomplished the same feat. He is the only father to have been alive to see his son also become world champion and it makes me proud.

"At Christmas my mother had us round the table and said, 'I'm sitting here with two F1 world champions. How cool is that?'"

Indeed.