Changing guia

From motorcycles and touring cars to Porsches and Formula Three racers, they will move like a blur through the streets of Macau at speeds that often exceed 300km/h. But no matter how fast these street racers go, they won't be moving as quickly as Macau itself, where the rapid pace of modernisation is breathtaking.

The 53rd Macau Grand Prix has arrived at a seminal moment with the new Macau ready to be unveiled. With the completion of the dazzling Wynn resort and casino, as well as the nearby Sands casino two years earlier, the Las Vegas style transformation of the main strip of the Macau Grand Prix, Avenida de Amizade, is now complete.

The transformation of the rest of Macau is not far behind. The Cotai Strip beckons as the massive Venetian complex is set to open in the third quarter of 2007 and Melco PBL Entertainment's City of Dreams, which features an underwater-themed casino, in the second half of 2008.

Because of the massive landfill between Coloane and Taipa, three islands have now become two. And while the burgeoning neon glitter of the Cotai Strip area does not shine directly on the famed Circuito da Guia racing route, its impact on the future of the race could be enormous.

Because of the developments on Cotai, over the next two years Macau will be going from having no retail malls to about five million square feet of announced mall space. It will be going from 10,000 hotel rooms to 28,000 submitted for approval and an eventual total of 60,000, which would be more than the city of San Francisco.

Already, some in this former Portuguese enclave are quietly starting to wonder if a rip-roaring, 24-hour casino town can afford to close down its main vehicular route for a full week to accommodate a race that, while the principal source of tourism in the past, will soon be playing a distant second fiddle to all the new resorts and casinos.

When the Macau Grand Prix began in the spring of 1954, a group of gentlemen racers, led by Fernando de Macedo Pinto, Carlos da Silva and Paulo Antas decided to run a motoring event around the dusty back roads of this fishing and gambling outpost. It remained an amateur affair until professionals began to show up in 1966 and in 1983 it was upgraded to a Formula Three race, won by legendary Brazilian racer Aryton Senna.