Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

So, now the championship has reverted to being about what happens on track rather than in an FIA hearing, we have just seven races left and Ferrari have a bald choice to make. Felipe Massa is 11 points adrift of the lead of the championship, Kimi Raikkonen 18.

They are not going to claw that back in the time remaining if they continue to operate an equal number one driver policy. With their backs to the wall, especially so after the hearing, they need to take advantage of the fact that McLaren will continue to give both of their drivers an equal shot at the title.

Logically, if only for simple mathematical reasons, the driver receiving the number one Ferrari treatment should now be Massa. But will they be able to bring themselves to do it, to tell their superstar signing Raikkonen - on a rumoured five times Massa's salary - that he must support the title campaign of his team-mate? And if they did, would Raikkonen comply?

This is a conundrum that has been building all season for both title-contending teams - ever since it became clear that Fernando Alonso and Raikkonen wouldn't automatically be the number ones of their respective teams on performance alone, that they indeed had genuine competition from their team-mates.

McLaren's superior reliability has allowed them to defer any decision by ensuring their two guys are one-two with just a small gap between them. In fact it's quite possible McLaren won't ever have to make that choice, that the individual performances and circumstances of each of their drivers will take care of the matter.

Massa now has to take an average of 1.57 points per race off Lewis Hamilton, an average of 1.29 off Alonso. With a faster car and number one treatment that might be just about feasible. Raikkonen's equivalent numbers would be 2.57 points per race from Hamilton and 2.29 points from Alonso. That would be a much taller order, especially given the superb reliability of the McLaren-Mercedes.

But things can turn around fast. If Raikkonen won this weekend and Massa non-finished, Kimi would be three points ahead and it would no longer make sense to favour Massa within the team. And so perhaps the solution becomes whichever of the Ferrari drivers is ahead going into any weekend becomes - for that race - the number one.

That way if Massa can keep his championship assault on track, so he keeps his status into the next race, and so on, until Raikkonen is mathematically out of it. But if Massa stumbles, suffers a non-finish, and his team-mate squeaks ahead in the points, then Kimi becomes their man and Felipe has to revert to the support role he played last year to Michael Schumacher.

What form might team-mate support take? It could mean sacrificing the ideal race strategy in order to play interference with the McLaren strategy. You might find yourself on a very light opening stint, getting pole and ensuring track position over the McLarens but hopefully in a position to allow your team-mate past, who you might then allow to escape while you delay the McLarens.

You might then be fuelled very heavily for the middle stint, forcing McLaren to skew their strategy away from being delayed further by you later on - which in the process forces them further away from the ideally faster strategy, and all the time your team-mate's lead increases.

It might mean controlling the race from the front, slowing the pace down if required to allow your team-mate to fuel up heavy but not suffer the consequences of falling too far behind the McLarens. Then when the time comes, with your team-mate behind you, you do nice gentle in- and out-laps at the final stop and lo and behold he comes out in front. Raikkonen has been the beneficiary of this one before when at McLaren - notably Spa 2005, which Montoya sacrificed to him.

But if Ferrari do end up playing such games, let's not damn them for it. This would be no rerun of Austria 2002, where a pre-assigned guy always had priority, but a savvy race team taking every chance it can to overcome a deficit and adapting itself to the circumstances. This would be entirely fair and within the ethics of two teams fighting for the world championship.

Now let's say Ferrari did adopt such a ploy and that Massa became their title chaser for the rest of the year. Let's just say that they did begin matching McLaren's reliability and had the faster car (two very big ifs, but let's just suppose) and that Massa duly began eating into the points advantage of the McLaren guys, helped by Raikkonen running interference.

Let's further assume that Hamilton and Alonso continued to take points off each other, with the advantage between them see-sawing from race to race, each allowed to fight the other.

This is when we would see Alonso becoming mightily cheesed off. He already feels compromised in his chase of the title by McLaren not being prepared to call Lewis off - he is fighting Ferrari with one hand and Hamilton with the other - but so far he has been fighting a team adopting a similar policy.

If he then saw that Ferrari had changed, and accorded one of their drivers a clearly defined number one role, his sense of the unfairness of it all would become overwhelming. It would become a monumental psychological challenge for him.

You might ask why he feels he should have the automatic right to team leadership? And logically of course, he does not. But competing isn't always about logic. It's also about skewing every possible thing in your favour.

That's the mindset of a champion. If all he did was climb into the car and drive the wheels off it, then he would be Kimi Raikkonen. And look where that's got Kimi: staring in the face of having to support Felipe Massa's title challenge.