And beyond the car companies stand a host of oil, tobacco, banking and consumer-goods firms that plaster their decals on cars and on trackside posters.The amounts of money involved in F1 may seem small change besides the turnover of such corporate giants.
Today Allsport is the name associated with trackside advertising rights and the Paddock Club.
This year Mr Ecclestone's family sold ISC for an undisclosed sum, but certainly many millions of dollars.As well as the FIA's 30% share of F1 TV revenues, two other sources of F1 revenues appear to have passed through the APM companies: income from the Paddock Club and money from trackside advertising which, together, now run to tens of millions of dollars a year.
The financial manager for one promoter told The Economist that Mr Ecclestone had given his company no alternative but to surrender trackside advertising rights to the APM companies.
Before Mr Ecclestone, they cared little for the detailed work of tying up commercial agreements with each of the race tracks covering trackside advertising, gate money, hospitality, television rights and so on.
Most also give up trackside advertising rights and set aside an area for the Paddock Club (a swish corporate hospitality suite that is part of the F1 circus).By the early 1990s Mr Ecclestone was to acquire yet another hat.
According to the equation above, so does the trackside observer, instead of the value 2c that classical physics predicts.
Tracing of individual car movements can be elaborated by adoption of automatic car identification systems, in which each vehicle is fitted with an individually coded transponder that is read by strategically located electronic scanners at trackside.
On some high-speed passenger lines the ATP system obviates use of traditional trackside signals.
Trackside control also developed slowly with the first signalman, or "railway policeman," located at passenger and goods depots, or stations, sited along the line.
If a passenger in a train moving at 100 km per hour shoots an arrow in the train's direction of motion at 200 km per hour, a trackside observer would measure the speed of the arrow as the sum of the two speeds, or 300 km per hour.
