By Nick Mulvenney

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

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts partnered with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company, to introduce the series with six teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 featured just five rounds, galgbtqhistoryproject.org this weekend’s race will be the third round of 13 the now 12 fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

“It’s just amazing, actually, the uptake and variety of events 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 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 excellent.”

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 limits at what are spectacular speeds for waterborne vessels.

“We didn’t set out to simply attract the avid sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans,” Coutts included.

“Most of our fans are not avid sailors, and that’s one of the factors why we have actually grown so rapidly. We are interesting individuals that just like watching a race, they don’t need to understand anything about sailboats.”

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out 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, perhaps even topping that,” said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

“The most essential thing is the fans watching on broadcast … however the fan experience on website is also critically important. We desire fans to come and have an excellent time and see some great racing.”

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

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is significantly 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 team comms,” he said.

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

There have, naturally, wiki.insidertoday.org been obstacles over the 6 years with the second season interfered with by the COVID pandemic and larsaluarna.se race days still in some cases at the grace of wind conditions.

A lack 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 very first time this weekend and wiki.asexuality.org among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all but one of the teams are, or quickly will be, privately owned or setiathome.berkeley.edu run.

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

“We understood that that was the entire method the design was established, that team owners would be able to trade their teams and ideally generate income out of it, however I didn’t think we ’d attain it this early. That’s been a nice surprise.” (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)