By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back to where it all began in Sydney this weekend and wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a brilliant future for asteroidsathome.net the innovative global sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts teamed up with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software application business, to launch the series with 6 groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 included just five rounds, oke.zone this weekend's race will be the third 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 variety of occasions 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 somewhere 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 idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and dokuwiki.stream the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"The majority of our fans are not devoted sailors, which's one of the reasons why we've grown so quickly. We are attracting people that simply like seeing a race, they don't have to understand anything about sailboats."

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

"I believe 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 enjoying on broadcast ... however the fan experience on website is also vitally essential. We want fans to come and have a fun time and see some fantastic racing."

Technological innovation is important to SailGP and numerous thousands of data points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for using race organisers, groups and to help broadcasters enhance the .

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is thrilled about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is significantly utilized to work through the mountain of information.

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

"The viewer will be taken on board and ride together with the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to take a look around anywhere they want. That's the future."

There have, naturally, been challenges over the six years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still often at the grace of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s implied the French team was not able to compete 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 larsaluarna.se the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however among the groups are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

"We understood that that was the entire way the design was established, that team owners would be able to trade their teams and ideally generate income out of it, however I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)