By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back 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 champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts teamed up with Larry Ellison, online-learning-initiative.org the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company, to launch the series with six groups 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 third round of 13 the now 12 fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

“It’s just amazing, actually, 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 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 great.”

The concept of Formula One on water is implicit in the league’s name and ratemywifey.com the comparison is not far from the mark when the world’s finest sailors push the F50 hindering catamarans to their limitations at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

“We didn’t set out to just interest the devoted sailing fan, we try to make this sport understandable and explainable for all sports fans,” Coutts added.

“Most of our fans are not devoted sailors, which is among the factors why we’ve grown so quickly. We are appealing to people that much like seeing a race, they do not need to understand anything about sailboats.”

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

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

Technological development is important to SailGP and numerous thousands of data points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for using race organisers, groups and to assist broadcasters improve the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

“The big development for us moving forward is the 360 degree view from on board the boat, with listening to the group comms,” he said.

“The audience will be taken on board and trip in addition to the Australian group in a race, and be able to browse wherever they want. That’s the future.”

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

A lack of F50s indicated the French group was not able 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 the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all but one of the teams are, or bytes-the-dust.com soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

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