By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where it all started in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the ingenious global sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts teamed up with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company, to release the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which started in Sydney in February 2019 included simply 5 rounds, 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 remarkable, actually, 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 desire to get to. So yeah, the future looks excellent."

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 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are spectacular speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to just attract the devoted sailing fan, we try to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts included.

"Most of our fans are not devoted sailors, and that is among the reasons that we've grown so rapidly. We are appealing to people that much like viewing a race, they do not have to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to watch 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, koha-community.cz a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most important thing is the fans seeing on broadcast ... however the fan experience on site is likewise critically important. We desire fans to come and have a fantastic time and see some fantastic racing."

Technological development is integral to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for using race organisers, groups and to help broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively utilized to overcome the mountain of data.

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

"The audience will be taken on board and ride along with the Australian team in a race, and be able to take a look around any place they desire. That's the future."

There have, naturally, been obstacles over the 6 years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still often at the mercy of wind conditions.

A shortage of F50s suggested the French group 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 full fleet of 12 boats will therefore race for the very first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all but one of the teams are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

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