Seven signings that would have changed Formula 1 history
24 July 2026 · 11 min read
Formula 1 history is written as much by the signings that happened as by the ones that stayed in a drawer. A contract signed six months earlier, a call that went unreturned, a sponsor who said no: small twists that would have reordered entire decades. These are seven driver-and-car crossovers we never got to see race, and why they still obsess fans.
1. Ayrton Senna in a Williams before 1994
Senna joined Williams in 1994, right when the rules had banned the electronic aids that had made that car an unbeatable machine the year before. He climbed into the champion team a year too late. The question that never fades is what would have happened if he'd made the jump in 1992 or 1993, with the Williams at its peak: a driver in a state of grace with, probably, the best car on the grid. For many, it would have been the most dominant combination of the nineties.
2. Fernando Alonso in the Vettel-era Red Bull
Between 2010 and 2013, Red Bull won four consecutive titles while Alonso fought for championships with a mostly inferior Ferrari, falling just short in 2010 and 2012. The thought experiment is irresistible: take the driver many considered the most complete of his generation and put him in the dominant car of the era. How many of those four titles would have changed hands? It's one of the most requested duels in What If mode.
3. Michael Schumacher at McLaren
During Ferrari's years of dominance, the great rival of Schumacher was McLaren, with Häkkinen first and Räikkönen later. They never shared a team. Imagining Schumacher building a project around McLaren-Mercedes instead of Ferrari changes the entire map of the turn of the millennium: perhaps Ferrari wouldn't have lived its golden age, and perhaps the most intense rivalry in the sport would have been resolved differently.
4. Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari, a decade earlier
Hamilton ended up wearing red, but the fantasy is another one: a Hamilton at his physical peak, in the mid-2010s, at the most historic team on the grid. Instead of piling up titles with Mercedes in an era of silver dominance, a Ferrari-Hamilton project would have pitted the best driver of the moment against the unique pressure of Maranello. It would have been another story — maybe with fewer crowns, maybe with more legend.
5. Max Verstappen in a Mercedes in 2021
The 2021 title was decided by a handful of points and a controversial final lap. But there's an even more provocative variant: what if Verstappen and Hamilton had swapped cars? With the aggressive Dutchman in the Mercedes and the veteran Briton in the Red Bull, the most electric duel of the last decade becomes an experiment on how much the car weighs and how much the driver. It's exactly the kind of question a simulator can attack by running it hundreds of times.
6. Alain Prost and Senna in the same team… for longer
Prost and Senna did share McLaren in 1988 and 1989, and their rivalry defined an era. But they split early, amid sparks. The reverse hypothesis — that they'd stayed together, or reunited at Williams in the mid-nineties — poses the most explosive team-mate pairing imaginable. Two world champions, two opposing driving philosophies, one garage. Maybe no team would have survived it politically; sportingly, it would have been pure gold.
7. A young talent in the worst car of its year
Not every hypothesis is about big teams. The flip side is just as fascinating: taking a future star and placing them in a car at the back of the grid. How much can an exceptional driver drag a mediocre machine? The answer, almost always, is "less than their legend suggests" — and that contrast teaches a lot about how much of Formula 1 is the man and how much the machine.
From argument to experiment
The beauty of these hypotheses is that they no longer have to stay in the realm of nostalgia. You can take any of them, put the driver in the car they never drove and run the season. It won't give you the truth — that doesn't exist — but a reasoned, repeatable and surprisingly addictive answer.
Start with the catalogue of hypotheses already posed, each with its verdict calculated from hundreds of simulations, or create your own in What If mode.