Lamont and his teammates narrowly avoided the Wooden Spoon with a face-saving 21-8 victory over Italy in the final round of games and the 30-year-old is happy to admit the tournament was a let-down.

The Scots entered the Six Nations on a surge of optimism after morale-boosting wins over South Africa and Argentina at the back end of 2010 but lost four of their five games in the Championship.

And Lamont has called on his side to learn from their mistakes and is adamant that they will now go into the World Cup in a better frame of mind.

“There’s no getting away from the fact that this year’s Championship was extremely disappointing, we really thought it was going to be our year but we clearly weren’t quite ready,” said the Scarlets star.

“But if we can learn from what went wrong then it doesn’t have to be a backwards step. After beating South Africa there wasn’t a risk of complacency but we made stupid mistakes that we shouldn’t have.

“The France game was a perfect example of that, where they punished us time and time again after we turned the ball over so that’s definitely an area to work on.

“Come the World Cup we are in a group with countries that we know we can go toe to toe with and we won’t just be targeting qualification from the group, we want to win every game we play.

“We beat Argentina twice away from home last year and we know all about England, we’ve beaten them before so that leaves the two banana skins of Romania and Georgia.

“We made the mistake of just targeting qualification in 2007 and took our foot off the gas against Argentina in the quarter-finals, we won’t be making that mistake this time around.”

Lamont himself endured a mixed Six Nations that saw him fail to make the starting line-up in the first two rounds of games before starting all the remaining encounters at inside centre.

But the 30-year-old has been quick to distance himself from a permanent shift in position when the World Cup comes around.

“I feel like I did pretty well there, Andy (Robinson) asked me to play there and I did a job but certainly I don’t see myself as a centre, I’ve played as a winger for 99% of my career after all,” he said.

“However it’s nice to be an option and I’ve certainly given the coach something to think about but once Graeme Morrison is fit again I think the starting berth is his.

“Competition for places can only ever be a good thing however. I don’t particularly care where I play as long as I’m playing, we’ve got spots up for grabs in most positions and I’m just pleased to be in the mix.”