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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, setiathome.berkeley.edu Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where everything began in Sydney this weekend and galgbtqhistoryproject.org 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the ingenious international sailing league.

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, elearnportal.science the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company, king-wifi.win to introduce the series with 6 teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply five rounds, this weekend's race will be the 3rd round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply amazing, really, the uptake and number 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 someplace around 20. If you compare that to Formula One that has 24, that's sort of where we want to get to. So yeah, the future appearances good."

The concept 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 finest sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to simply interest the devoted 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 avid sailors, and that's one of the reasons why we've grown so quickly. We are appealing to people that much like seeing a race, they don't need to understand anything about sailboats."

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

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

"The most important thing is the fans seeing on broadcast ... however the fan experience on site is also vitally important. We desire fans to come and have a good time and see some terrific racing."

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

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The big development for us going 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 trip together with the Australian group in a race, and be able to browse anywhere they desire. That's the future."

There have, obviously, been difficulties over the 6 years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the grace of wind conditions.

A lack of F50s meant the French group was unable 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 funsilo.date the very first time this weekend and utahsyardsale.com among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however among the teams 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," said Coutts, who plans to bring another number of teams on board next year.

"We knew that that was the entire way the model was established, that group owners would be able to trade their teams and ideally make cash out of it, but I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." ( by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)