It remains controversial, of course. In the week football’s World Cup has kicked off in neighbouring Qatar, unease over international sport’s embrace of a region with an atrocious record on human rights is once again at the top of the news agenda. LIV Golf, ownership of Newcastle United… Saudi’s eye-watering global investment is impossible to ignore, and for event promoters and sanctioning bodies equally impossible to turn down, it seems.
Whitaker accepts ‘sportswashing’ as a concept and understands why so many of us are reticent. How can he not? But he only speaks for motor sport, insists Saudi society is changing and that racing can play its part in a positive cultural revolution. Still, the awkward caveat of what organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International continue to report – and the state killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 – lingers over everything that follows. As it always does when we write about motor sport’s new romance with exotic Saudi Arabia.
Whitaker says people can be “better informed”. “I think motor sport does allow us the opportunity to change perceptions,” he states. “We’ve been speaking to the F1 drivers. It’s helpful to give them more information about Saudi. Let’s be honest, they don’t know much about the country. If they can be better informed, go away and say it’s not the place you think it is, that’s one good thing the sport can do.
“A lot of people who write what they write have never been to Saudi. It will have changed even since you came. I’m keen on making sure we develop a platform that focuses on young people and the opportunities they have.