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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where it all began in Sydney this weekend and 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for the ingenious international sailing league.

An Olympic champion and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts partnered with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software business, to launch the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 included simply five rounds, wiki.die-karte-bitte.de this weekend's race will be the 3rd round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply amazing, in fact, the uptake and number of events now," SailGP chief executive Coutts told Reuters at the Sydney Opera House on Friday.

"We're certainly sitting at 13, and aiming to increase that over the next seasons to someplace around 20. If you compare that to Formula One that has 24, that's sort of where we wish to get to. So yeah, the future appearances great."

The concept of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors press the F50 hindering catamarans to their limits at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to just attract the passionate sailing fan, we try to make this sport understandable and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, and that's one of the reasons that we've grown so rapidly. We are appealing to people that similar to viewing a race, they don't need to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out to enjoy Tom Slingsby's Australia team win the 2nd round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I think you'll see numerous of our events this year now like that, perhaps even topping that," said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most crucial thing is the fans watching on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is also extremely essential. We want fans to come and have a fun time and see some great racing."

Technological development is essential to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, teams and to help broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is delighted about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively used to resolve the of information.

"The huge advancement for us moving forward is the 360 degree view from on board the boat, with listening to the group comms," he said.

"The viewer will be taken on board and trip in addition to the Australian group in a race, and be able to look around any place they want. That's the future."

There have, naturally, surgiteams.com been challenges over the six years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still in some cases at the mercy of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s indicated the French team was not able to complete at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and damage to the boat once they got it ruled them out of the Auckland leg.

The complete fleet of 12 boats will for that reason race for the very first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for oke.zone Coutts is that all but one of the groups are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

"These groups are now costing $50 million, I would never ever have actually forecasted that this early on," said Coutts, who plans to bring another couple of teams on board next year.

"We understood that that was the whole method the model was established, that team owners would be able to trade their teams and ideally make money out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)