Strong increase in Macau Grand Prix Museum visitors

The number of visitors to the Macau Grand Prix Museum saw a 22 percent increase in 2006, with individual travelers gaining more weight compared to those brought by travel agencies to see one of the city’s main drawcards. Isaac Lai’s family is of the size of an authentic tour group, but the Hong Kong resident prides himself as the organizer of the tour that brought to Macau during Spring Festival almost twenty of his family members, from three generations. “The group includes many children and elderly people, so I tried to plan the trip in a way that could be interesting for everybody”, Lai pointed out, to explain why he included the museum in the schedule of the three-day visit to Macau. While the Lai family leader fights to gather all his family members in order to move to the next tourist spot, another family, the Shen’s, from Shanghai, found out that they could not leave just yet, as their son stayed behind to take a ride at the museum’s car race simulator. “He loves car racing, never misses an F-1 race”, recounted the proud mother of 12-year old Shen Siyue. They were taken to the museum by a family relative living in Macau, who had shown them by car the Macau Grand Prix city circuit before heading to the museum. Between the hustle and bustle of the Lai and Shen families, a tourist takes his time to observe each detail of the items on display and read the descriptions. “What grabs more of my attention at the museum were the F-3 cars of drivers who afterwards became F-1 champions”, said Portuguese Alexandre Reis, on holiday in Macau, where he has relatives. Among the more valuable items of the museum that tells the story of the Macau Grand Prix, taking place in the city streets since 1954, are the cars driven by Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher or Takuma Sato at the F-3 races in the challenging Guia Circuit, before heading to F-1. During the Chinese New Year holidays, the Macau Grand Prix Museum, of the Macau Government Tourist Office, welcomed around half a thousand visitors a day. Last year, more than 88 thousand people visited the museum.