Every advertising board angled for the television cameras and every hospitality marquee reserved for a race weekend's biggest spenders at a Formula One Grand Prix traces back to a system one man built almost by accident. Paddy McNally, who turned Formula One's trackside signage and corporate hospitality into a global business through his company Allsport Management, died on July 22, 2026, at his home in Sevenhampton, Wiltshire. He was 88.

McNally was born in Gravesend, Kent, in 1937 and was educated at Stonyhurst College, according to The Sun. He came to motor racing first as a writer, covering Grand Prix events for Autosport magazine in London, and raced sports cars himself as an amateur through the 1960s, according to Grand Prix.com. By the late 1970s he had moved to Switzerland to work as a sponsorship consultant for Marlboro, and it was there, tidying up the trackside advertising boards at races, that he began the long working partnership with Bernie Ecclestone that would define his career.

McNally founded Allsport Management in Geneva in 1983, consolidating the sale of Formula One's trackside advertising, and the following year he created the Paddock Club, the trackside hospitality operation that grew into a multimillion dollar business and set the pattern for VIP entertaining at motorsport events worldwide, according to Grand Prix.com. He sold Allsport Management to CVC Capital Partners in 2006, in a deal reported at around 350 million dollars, and stayed on as the company's chief executive afterward. He announced his retirement in December 2010 and stepped down in 2011, after 27 years running Allsport, handing the role to David Campbell, according to Pitpass.

McNally married Anne Downing, daughter of the racing driver Ken Downing, in 1967. She died in 1980, leaving him to raise their two young sons, Sean and Rollo, alone. It was in that period that he met Sarah Ferguson, who was hired to help look after the boys, and the two dated for three years, from 1982 to 1985, before her marriage to Prince Andrew. They remained friends afterward, and McNally later lent her one of his ski chalets in the Swiss resort of Verbier, where he had wintered since 1980, according to HELLO!.

McNally's death came two months after that of his elder son, Sean, who died suddenly in Scotland in the spring of 2026.

McNally never worked the front of a grid or a boardroom the way his longtime partner Ecclestone did, preferring the technical, unglamorous machinery of the sport: trackside boards, hospitality tents, sponsorship contracts, the pieces that made Formula One's television product possible. The Paddock Club he devised still operates at Grand Prix weekends decades after he stepped away from it, and the advertising system he built out of a roll of signage at a racetrack remains close to how the sport still sells the space around its cars to the world.