By Nick Mulvenney

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

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts partnered with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software business, wolvesbaneuo.com to release the series with six teams all owned by the league.

While the which began in Sydney in February 2019 included simply 5 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 just incredible, in fact, the uptake and number of occasions now," SailGP chief executive 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 great."

The idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the comparison is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"The majority of our fans are not passionate sailors, which's one of the factors why we have actually grown so rapidly. We are interesting individuals that much like enjoying a race, they don't have to comprehend anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out to watch Tom Slingsby's Australia group 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, maybe even topping that," said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most essential thing is the fans seeing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is likewise critically important. We desire fans to come and have a fun time and see some great racing."

Technological innovation is important to SailGP and numerous countless information points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the usage of race organisers, imoodle.win teams and to assist broadcasters improve the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The huge development 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 trip together with the Australian group in a race, and be able to look around anywhere they desire. That's the future."

There have, of course, been difficulties over the 6 years with the second season interrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still often at the mercy of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s implied the French team 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 full fleet of 12 boats will for that reason race for the first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however one of the teams are, or akropolistravel.com quickly will be, independently owned or run.

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

"We knew that that was the entire way the model was set up, that group owners would be able to trade their groups and hopefully make money out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)