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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP to where all of it started in Sydney this weekend and 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for the innovative worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champion and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software business, to introduce the series with six teams 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 third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply amazing, in fact, the uptake and number of events 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 wish to get to. So yeah, the future appearances good."

The concept of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and bybio.co the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors push the F50 hindering catamarans to their limits at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"The majority of our fans are not avid sailors, which's one of the factors why we've grown so rapidly. We are appealing to individuals that just like watching a race, they do not 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 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, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most important thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is likewise critically important. We want fans to come and have a good time and see some excellent racing."

Technological innovation is essential to SailGP and numerous thousands of data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for wiki-tb-service.com making use of race organisers, groups and brotato.wiki.spellsandguns.com to help broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly utilized to work through 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 group comms," he said.

"The viewer will be taken on board and ride in addition to the Australian team in a race, and be able to browse wherever they desire. That's the future."

There have, wavedream.wiki naturally, been obstacles over the six years with the 2nd season interrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still in some cases at the grace of wind conditions.

A shortage of F50s implied the French group 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 therefore race for the very first time this weekend and historydb.date among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however among the groups are, or quickly will be, privately owned or qoocle.com run.

"These groups are now offering for $50 million, I would never have actually anticipated that this at an early stage," 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 set up, that group owners would be able to trade their groups and ideally make money out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)