By Nick Mulvenney

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

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, bytes-the-dust.com the billionaire founder of the Oracle software application company, buysellammo.com to launch the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured just five rounds, 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 fantastic, in fact, the uptake and number of events now," SailGP president Coutts informed 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 looks excellent."

The idea 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 best sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to simply appeal to the passionate sailing fan, we try to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"The majority of our fans are not passionate sailors, which's one of the reasons we have actually grown so quickly. We are attracting people that simply like viewing a race, they do not 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 second round of the series in Auckland last month.

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

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

Technological innovation is essential to SailGP and hundreds of countless information points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the usage of race organisers, teams and to assist broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively used 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 group comms," he said.

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

There have, obviously, wiki.rrtn.org been obstacles over the six years with the 2nd season interrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the mercy of wind conditions.

A lack of F50s meant the French group was unable to contend 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 bybio.co that reason race for the very first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however among the teams are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

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