The crucial decisions that set up F1's two most dominant dynasties

The supremacy displayed by Ferrari and Mercedes in the past two decades is unparalleled. Although their legacies might have taken different turns without the preceding and seemingly unrelated yet ultimately influential choices made by their rivals

- Braam Peens

For all of the space-age technology fuelling its Formula One's hyper-dependency on predictive modelling in the perfection of tyre utilisation or race strategies, history proves the inexact science of human decision-making can still trump all rational outcomes.

F1 endured its most lasting periods of single-team superiority with Ferrari (20012004) and Mercedes (2014-2020). Through a sustained combination of superhuman driver-and-car packages benefiting from arguably less effective opposition throughout, the names of Michael Schumacher and later Lewis Hamilton became all-too-familiar entries in the history books.

Ignoring the technical, regulatory and simply circumstantial enablers of such prolonged periods of rule, for remarkably different reasons, both Ferrari and Mercedes' causes were abetted by the respective myopic, fate-fixing resolutions by McLaren and Williams.

These exercised options could have halted or at least impeded the Ferrari and Mercedes eras from reaching their full runaway reign, and possibly even saved Williams from its inglorious demise to boot.

Alas, they did not. How different things could have been... McLaren-Mercedes entered the millennium on a high. Acing F1's 1998 move to narrowtrack cars and grooved tyres, Mika Häkkinen had kept the crown out of the hands of a determined Ferrari and Michael Schumacher in the preceding two years and lost the 2000 championship by a whisker to the Ferrari driver. Having one of F1's fastest-ever drivers in Häkkinen, and its most talented designer in Adrian Newey - today responsible for all of Red Bull's successes - McLaren was the only team that could conceivably arrest the Ferrari juggernaut.