Anyone familiar with the racing scene of old Earth may be surprised by the relative lack of logos laid onto the riders and the machines in the Planet Racing Series. In the old days, every sponsor of a racer would want -- rightly so -- their name and/or logo to appear prominently on the riders gear and on the machine itself. This led to riders and machines becoming hugely cluttered mobile advertising billboards -- not necessarily a bad thing, but when humans began to move out into space and bring their racing with them, they ran into problems.

The Planet Racing series was becoming very popular, but one rapidly growing group of fans -- the populous n'Thari species -- just couldn't cope with the plethora of sponsor logos appearing on the riders and the bikes. It wasn't that they objected to advertising, but their visual sensing organs had a hard time coping with that level of detail. Many talks ensued -- and in the end, the USPRA decided that they would be foolish to lose an audience potentially larger than most of the other intelligent species put together.

The solution was to simplify the logos and only allow a maximum of three on each rider and machine. This didn't mean that riders couldn't have more than three sponsors, but those extra sponsors names could not appear of the machine or riders.

However, in a complicated arrangement with the vidcasting network which carried all of the Planet Racing series, a kind of closed-caption thing was worked out where, whenever racers were in view and occupied a certain percentage of the screen area, all of their sponsors logs would appear at the bottom of the screen. The n'Thari were allowed to manufacture vidsets which would allow them to turn off this feature.