Qiddiya

In R- Uh, i- um, near Riyadh.

It's in Qiddiya, isn't it? Yeah.

Qiddiya City.

Yeah.

Yes.

Um, first of all, big news, fantastic news, and I know that the two of you have been working on this project for quite some time.

But you've also been involved in other projects like Qiddiya, Jeddah, Las Vegas, so this is not the first time you're working together.

Um, but we just wanna get a sense of what it's like to design a racing circuit, where that design comes from, and, and some of the other details that come in a little bit later.

So I guess my first question to you both would be how long have you been working on this project so far?

...

Qiddiya's still apparently in the works.

Oh yeah, true.

But Qiddiya's in Saudi Arabia, isn't it?

Yes, yeah.

So that won't...

I did a session earlier today with the PIF, with several representatives of significant organizations that are building out the sporting ecosystem in Saudi Arabia.

We focused on Qiddiya, which is one of these giga projects-

Yeah.

Mm

... um, that they've got going on.

I do love the way that people talk about giga projects in Saudi Arabia because in order to contextualize what that means, they always then follow up with, um, some sort of large country that is the same size as whatever this project is doing.

And during a video on stage, uh, about Qiddiya, I l- leant to Mark Archer, who's the, the chap from Qiddiya who's talking about it, saying like, "Is this the one that's the size of Belgium?"

[laughs]

I've only been able to watch some videos, uh, related to the, uh, Extreme E, uh, upcoming race, and one you had last year in Saudi Arabian.

Was it Qiddiya City? How do you pronounce it?

That's correct, yeah.

Yeah.

What does it take to, to get all the, the best drivers, to innovate the cars, the best mechanics, you know, sponsors, sole deals? Like what is the process? Like how do you kind of strategize for, for the next race?

Well, first of all, it's a 365 approach.

So, um, we're, we're racing in Qiddiya, the City of Play, um, which doesn't exist at this moment in time, or it, it, it...

There, there's a, a amusement park called Six Flags with the, the most extreme roller coaster on the planet.

As of right now, we've done a lot in that deployment space, and now it's realizing the value creation opportunities that exist and the synergies that exist.

For example, Qiddiya is a massive gigaproject that we're building.

It's a massive sport entertainment city about 30- to 40-minute drive southwest of Riyadh.

Mm-hmm.

As we think about what Qiddiya's doing and the infrastructure that it's building, a huge component of that is what is, call it, the software that's gonna fill that hardware that they're building.

So as we think about the c- interconnectedness between Qiddiya and, for example, Surge, which is an investment company that we've established that invests in sports, opportunities to find synergies between them around, hey, Qiddiya's building a national tennis center.

It's gonna be a world-class facility.

What kind of content can we put in it, and what kind of content can we own? Well, a natural evolution of that was something along the lines of the ATP Masters 1000.