Jonathan Noble: Online

After the kind of season we've had, it's always quite a difficult task to look back and try and pick the defining moments that made the year.

You know, those split seconds that change the course of history - be they genius moves behind the wheel, major blunders by teams and drivers, or behind-the-scenes decisions that helped set in motion the events that delivered us a finale like never before.

You could look at Lewis Hamilton's Montreal slip-up as the key factor in making the year so close. Or Massa's engine failure in Budapest. Then there was Spa and the stewards; Ferrari's pitstop disaster in Singapore; Hamilton's composure being solidified by off-track hassle in China - or even the rain that came down in the final minutes at Interlagos.

But if you start scraping away at the surface of these events - try to put them in the context of what caused them and what they caused - you soon realise that all of the above examples are simply part and parcel of the normal tumult of a Formula One racing season.

Lewis Hamilton passes Michael Schumacher on the Ferrari pitwall during the 2007 European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring © XPB

They helped shape the year, but they were not the root cause of what it was.

We need to scrape much deeper than simply looking at points lost here and there.

We need to trace back all the elements we saw this year, and include off-track ones like the Max Mosley News of the World expose, to find the moment when the chain of events first sparked to deliver what we saw this year.

And I have a wild theory that we need to go back to Sunday, September 10, 2006.

It was on that afternoon at Monza that Michael Schumacher confirmed to the world he was retiring - and set-off a sequence of events that, you can argue, are still being felt today.

For a start, had Schumacher not decided to quit - and instead had taken the brave step of going face-to-face with Kimi Raikkonen at Ferrari for the past two years, it's possible that he would have won one, if not both, of the last two championships. I'm not saying he would, but there is a chance.

You could certainly never have imagined him struggling with motivation and qualifying issues like Raikkonen has this year; nor made the schoolboy errors that Massa suffered from in Australia, Malaysia and Hungary. In fact, there is a strong argument to suggest he would have walked this year's championship and it would have been over shortly after mid-season.

As it was, his decision to step back left the way open for Hamilton and Massa to emerge - giving both the opportunity to step up to the plate and become title contenders in their own right. Both men would be viewed very differently today - with perhaps less success - if Schumacher had stuck it out.

But that is just the basic view on what a difference Schumacher's decision to retire made - because you could go so far as to say he has also shaped the sport off the track in a way that no one could predict.

Now, just imagine for a second that Schumacher had decided not to retire - and therefore not given his technical director Ross Brawn the perfect opportunity to take a sabbatical from the sport.

There is every chance that Brawn would have stayed on board, delayed the sabbatical plans and almost certainly not ended up at Honda at the end of last year.

And after the kind of season the Japanese manufacturer had had in 2007, allied to the car produced this year, it's not unreasonable to imagine Honda pulling out of F1 if they had not had the future promise that Brawn has bought them.

Michael Schumacher and Ross Brawn at the 2008 Spanish Grand Prix © XPB

So it's not too hard to link Schumacher's decision to quit, to keeping Honda - and therefore arch rivals Toyota - totally committed to the sport.

Yet the effect Schumacher's retirement has goes even deeper than this. If Brawn had not stepped down from Ferrari, then there would never have been the need for the staffing reshuffle that resulted in chief mechanic Nigel Stepney's disillusionment about getting passed over for a more senior role at the team.

It was that disillusionment that led to Stepney scouting around for job opportunities elsewhere - which brought him into contact with Mike Coughlan. And so 'Spygate' began.

By the end of Spygate, as we of course know, McLaren were thrown out of the constructors' championship, were fined $100 million and F1 faced intrigue off-track like never before.

And that is how the Schumacher influence takes us on to Mosley. Had Mosley not become such a public figure in 2007 through the Spygate affair, then there is a chance the News of the World may have passed over any interest in his private life when they were tipped off about what he was up to. Max who? The paper could well have said when offered the story.

Mosley's private life of course had a huge impact on the sport this year - not only forcing him to face a confidence vote in his position but also perhaps galvanising the views of the teams, who felt they needed to form the Formula One Teams' Association (FOTA) to perform a counter to the divide-and-conquer tactics sometimes employed by Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone.

So you can trace a line from Schumacher's retirement to Brawn's exit, Honda's place in F1, Massa's emergence, Stepney's disillusionment, Spygate, the Max Mosley News of the World expose and the latest rules-wrangling between the FIA and the teams.

It's a fun theoretical exercise, but does illustrate perfectly how in the world of F1 events can never been seen in total isolation - and why it is often more important to understand the context of why things have happened rather than what has happened.

The chaos theory suggests that a butterfly flapping its wings can set off a sequence of events that leads to a typhoon in Japan (or a rainstorm in Brazil). After the season we had this year, who knows where the ripple effects will take us from here. And for that, we should be happy.