The FIA GT Word CUP – one of the most prestigious GT races of the season –  is coming back to Macau after a three-year absence due to the pandemic.

Official manufacturers and some of the category’s top drivers will be present.

Macau has always mixed the prestige of a unique and top-level event, had crowned the greatest drivers of our era and, with now 70 years of history behind it, is one of the world’s toughest circuits.

And not just because of the inherent technical difficulties of the track. The big problem with Macau is that it is impossible to test.

Macau must be prepared in the simulator.

Not only because it is a street circuit – its roads are open to regular traffic for the rest of the year – , not only because the track itself is thousands of miles away from Europe and from the motorsport we know.

But also because Macau is a very peculiar track, with super high speed sections, very slow ones and a very difficult to memorize sequence of corners in the “mountain” part.

Any mistake during free practice (with walls and guard rails acting as escape routes) can preclude the team from doing the car development work that is absolutely necessary.

The driver must be ready to perfection, must learn every millimeter, every secret, every bump.

The team must “do its homework” and arrive with an already honed setup, ready to test its assumptions and consolidate the work done: the more work you can do before arriving in Macau, the more certainty you can give your drivers.

It is no coincidence that one of Italy’s top talents, Matteo Cairoli, has spent several hours on Skydrive’s Avehil simulator.

The driver from Como, an official Porsche driver, will be making his debut on the Guia track this year, and the best way for him to bridge the experience gap with the other drivers he will have to race with has been to grind miles on the simulator: 3 session and more than 11 hours of work.

“The work with Matteo has been very fruitful: we started by filing down small flaws in our mathematical model of the Porsche 911 GT3 R by making initial runs on tracks known to Matteo, then moving to the Guia. – said Cristiano Giardina.
After an initial learning phase, Matteo started pushing and piling lap after lap, interspersing his driving sessions with discussions with the engineers. He is a natural, fast immediately in all conditions, great at driving on technical shortcomings, but with a car in place he can be unbeatable. We’ve worked for that.”

Now it’s up to the track, the real one.
The one where, in addition to preparation and driving skills, courage counts so much: the one element that Matteo did not prepare on the simulator, but which, certainly, he did not need to.