When it comes to monthly sports magazines about F1 the name which springs to mind is F1 Racing. The first line of the 'about us' text on the magazine's website bills it as "capturing all the drama and glamour of Formula 1" and, as any regular reader will know, it does this well.

There are glossy pictures of drivers and fun facts about the sport. The magazine isn't renowned for coverage of F1's finances so when Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt saw that its lead news story in the June issue's news section covered this subject he read it with interest. He expected the piece would scrape the surface of the sport's arcane finances but he didn't think he would find information which wildly differs from official data. However, this is exactly what he got.

The story has the headline of "Formula 1: the world's fourth largest economy" and its premise alone is surprising to say the least. The piece points out that "if you were to add together the turnovers of the 200-plus sponsors who are financially involved in Formula 1, the sport would have a combined wealth totalling a mind-blowing $3.787 trillion." It goes on to say that this would rank fourth when compared to the Gross Domestic Products of countries according to the International Monetary Fund.

You may be thinking 'What's up with this?' Well, to say it is like comparing apples with oranges is an understatement. Take Vodafone for example. It had turnover of £44.5bn in the year to 31 March 2010 with the vast majority of this coming from the company selling access to its mobile and broadband services. Vodafone paid out around £45m last year to sponsor McLaren but this of course does not make the telecoms company's turnover that of F1.

To see just how bizarre this logic is, consider comparing the annual turnover of sponsors paying F1 teams to the annual earnings of people paying for a magazine subscription. Let's say the magazine has a total of six subscribers - five of whom each earn £20,000 and one who happens to be Bernie Ecclestone with his £4m annual salary. Would it be fair to say that the magazine's "combined wealth" is £4.1m? We think not. In fact, there seems to be little connection between the earnings of a magazine's subscribers and the magazine's wealth or, likewise, the turnover of a sport's sponsors and the wealth of the sport itself. Surprisingly, this bizarre methodology is not the distortion of fact in the article.

It continues to say "the research proves that F1 continues to attract the biggest multinational companies in the world - and they're all after a slice of its audience. After all, consider that in 2009 F1 attracted 1.7 billion television viewers.".

In reality, the official Global Broadcast Report produced by Formula One Administration shows that F1 had a total of 600m viewers in 2008 with this falling to 520m in 2009. It is a far cry from the 1.7bn viewers which F1 Racing claims that the sport had. One wonders where the magazine got the figure from and why it didn't use the official data from Bernie Ecclestone's Formula One Administration. Since the Global Broadcast Report is distributed throughout the sport Sylt and Pitpass won't be the only ones who have noticed this difference.

The news story left Sylt longing for the good old days of F1 Racing under the stewardship of the much respected Matt Bishop when the magazine seemed to be filled with more interviews with bosses such as Bernie and Mosley. Sales of the magazine's UK edition have slipped by 12,004 since 2007 when Bishop left to become McLaren's communications chief and it may take some time before it recovers.