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I love those what if scenarios. The most optimistic one I've read about Senna is that he would go on to win 1994, 95, 96 and 97. Safety wouldn't develop so Schumacher would die from that crash in Silverstone 99, Senna would take his place and win one more for Ferrari

Then years later he would be team principal at Honda until they bail out from failure so Senna go on and buy the operation founding the Senna GP to win the 2009 world championship

Hmm, I don't think Senna would have retired as champion - he was far too driven by winning, and if he was winning races and titles, he'd have wanted to keep winning. Assuming he wins 1996 and 1997 in your scenario at the very least, I think he'd want to give it another go in 1998. It just depends on if he'd have stood for "the Mecachrome impostor". I remember at the time there was great confidence around Williams that there would be no real change since Mecachrome were making the Renault engines anyway so it would just be a different badge. Obviously history tells us a different story now

There are a couple of other things to take into account, though. One is those grooved tyres and narrower cars for 1998. The other is the possibility of going back to McLaren - I think Senna finishing his career back there would have been far more likely than him finishing it at Ferrari in the end, especially if we're assuming Michael would have gone there anyway. I suppose we could assume a bizarro worst/best case scenario where Ayrton leaves Williams after winning 1995, 1996 and 1997 to rejoin McLaren and immediately win 1998, 1999 and maybe even 2000. But that's probably overestimating his abilities

It's amazing, though - the first of the articles I did has another alternative scenario, where McLaren pick Piquet over Senna for 1988 (which is what they wanted to do, until Prost persuaded them otherwise), which basically leads to a potential timeline where Senna never wins the title at all. There are fine margins and so much comes down to the choices drivers and teams make - or, when you're coming up with these scenarios, the decisions you think they'd have made

I've said for a long time that what we need is the equivalent of a revamped, fully licensed Motorsport Manager covering F1, F2 and F3 where you can start it at any point between 1968 and 2018. Let the computers decide

The only reason JV was at Williams was because Senna died and the team were looking for a replacement. Frentzen wasn’t available for 1996 and the team never got behind Hill.

Had Senna not died then JV wouldn’t have been placed at Williams, most likely his F1 debut would have been delayed by a couple of years or not happened at all.

And no JV perhaps means no BAR and therefore no Mercedes - Hamilton domination

So who does Ken Tyrrell sell out to them, be it 1998 or later?

Ralf Schumacher world champion.

I'd make it my mission to travel through every possible parallel universe (what a guy) to see if that was possible, but I doubt there's one where that even comes close to happening

As much as everyone here loves to rag on Ralf, he won more races than many drivers put on a pedestal here. Had he won a championship he'd be no worse a one-hit wonder than Villeneuve.

As much as everyone here loves to rag on Ralf, he won more races than many drivers put on a pedestal here. Had he won a championship he'd be no worse a one-hit wonder than Villeneuve.

The problem with the two drivers mentioned is that they had masses of unfulfilled potential. Both were great talents who plateaued far too soon, spending the latter stage of their F1 careers mired in mediocrity. Hence why they both get ragged on.