Felipe Massa on Thursday insisted he is not Ferrari’s number two driver, confirming he is aiming for victory this weekend in Hungary.
Since Hockenheim, where the Brazilian obeyed a team order to let teammate Fernando Alonso win, Brazilian cartoonists have depicted Massa as a puppet.

“People will see him now as a ‘yes man’ who bends to the will of the company,” David Coulthard wrote in his latest Telegraph column.

“And maybe they are right. Team player or stooge? The line is thin.”

Mercedes’ Norbert Haug said at a pre-race press conference in Hungary that the application of a driver hierarchy can affect motivation.

“If you say ‘you are number two’ … it’s a complex issue,” said the German.

“If the drivers are not fully motivated you will not achieve anything. That needs to be kept in mind,” added Haug.

Massa told reporters at the Hungaroring that he is aiming to win this weekend’s race, where last year he suffered life-threatening injuries in a qualifying crash.

“The time I have to I say I am the number two driver, I will not race anymore,” he pledged.

Earlier, he arrived at the Budapest venue with Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali.

Hans-Joachim Stuck has slammed the front wing affair involving Red Bull at Silverstone.

German Stuck, a former grand prix driver and now motor sport boss for Volkswagen, said: “What the team management did in Britain was an absolute outrage”.

A furore was sparked after it emerged that team boss Christian Horner ordered the new front wing fixed to Mark Webber’s car be transferred to the sister RB6 driven by Sebastian Vettel.

Stuck believes the incident has all the hallmarks of the influence of Red Bull’s motor sport consultant and Austrian Dr Helmut Marko.

“Christian Horner is just a puppet, the strings for Red Bull boss Dietrich Mateschitz are pulled solely by Marko,” he wrote in his column for the TZ newspaper.

“And whoever decided to take the new wing away from Webber qualified for his final pension,” added Stuck.

“Mateschitz must respond by putting in a new man at Red Bull,” he said, recommending the current team boss of Red Bull’s second formula one team for the job.

“(Franz) Tost is in every respect one of the best managers in formula one,” said Stuck.