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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where everything began in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for the innovative global sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software business, to launch the series with 6 teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 included simply 5 rounds, this weekend's race will be the third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's just fantastic, in fact, the uptake and number of events now," SailGP president 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 looks good."

The idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and sitiosecuador.com the comparison is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are awesome speeds for .

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

"The majority of our fans are not passionate sailors, which's one of the reasons why we've grown so quickly. We are appealing to individuals that similar to seeing a race, they don't have to understand anything about sailboats."

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

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

"The most essential thing is the fans viewing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is likewise essential. We want fans to come and have a fun time and see some terrific racing."

Technological innovation is integral to SailGP and hundreds of countless information points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the use of race organisers, groups and to assist broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively employed to overcome the mountain of information.

"The big advancement 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 ride together with the Australian group in a race, and be able to take a look around wherever they desire. That's the future."

There have, classicalmusicmp3freedownload.com of course, been obstacles over the six years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still often at the mercy of wind conditions.

A shortage of F50s indicated the French team was not able 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 therefore race for the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all but among the groups are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

"These teams are now costing $50 million, I would never ever have actually forecasted that this early," said Coutts, king-wifi.win who prepares to bring another number of groups on board next year.

"We knew that that was the entire way the design was set up, that group owners would be able to trade their groups and hopefully generate income out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a great surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)