By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, hb9lc.org Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where all of it started in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a brilliant future for the ingenious worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, with Larry Ellison, forum.altaycoins.com the billionaire creator of the Oracle software company, to launch the series with six teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply 5 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 incredible, really, the uptake and variety of occasions 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 desire to get to. So yeah, the future appearances 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 finest sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

“We didn’t set out to just appeal to the passionate sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport reasonable and explainable for all sports fans,” Coutts added.

“Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, and that’s one of the factors why we have actually grown so rapidly. We are interesting people that similar to seeing a race, they do not need to comprehend anything about sailboats.”

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to enjoy Tom Slingsby’s Australia group win the second round of the series in Auckland last month.

“I think you’ll see numerous of our events this year now like that, maybe even topping that,” said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

“The most important thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast … however the fan experience on website is likewise essential. We want fans to come and have a good time and see some excellent racing.”

Technological innovation is important to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the usage of race organisers, groups and to assist broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is thrilled about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly 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 group comms,” he said.

“The viewer will be taken on board and trip along with the Australian group in a race, and be able to look around wherever they desire. That’s the future.”

There have, 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 mercy of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s indicated the French team was unable 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 full fleet of 12 boats will for that reason race for the first time this weekend and among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however one of the teams are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

“These teams are now selling for $50 million, I would never have forecasted that this early,” said Coutts, who prepares to bring another couple of groups on board next year.

“We understood that that was the entire method the model was established, that team owners would have the ability to trade their teams and hopefully make money out of it, but I didn’t believe we ’d attain it this early. That’s been a great surprise.” (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)