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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 brilliant future for the innovative international sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de the billionaire founder of the Oracle software application company, to release 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, championsleage.review this weekend's race will be the 3rd round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's just remarkable, actually, the uptake and variety of events 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 wish to get to. So yeah, the future appearances good."

The idea of One on water is implicit in the league's name and king-wifi.win the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"The majority of our fans are not avid sailors, and that's one of the reasons we've grown so quickly. We are attracting individuals that simply like watching a race, they do not have to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out to enjoy Tom Slingsby's Australia group win the 2nd round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I believe you'll see several of our occasions 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 ... however the fan experience on website is likewise critically important. We desire fans to come and have a good time and see some terrific racing."

Technological development is important to SailGP and numerous countless data points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the use of race organisers, teams and to help broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively employed to work through the mountain of data.

"The huge advancement for us moving 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 trip in addition to the Australian team in a race, and be able to take a look around anywhere they desire. That's the future."

There have, obviously, been challenges over the 6 years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still in some cases at the grace of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s suggested the French group was unable to contend at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and forum.altaycoins.com 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 first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however among the teams are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

"These teams are now selling for $50 million, I would never ever have anticipated that this early," 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 established, that team owners would have the ability 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 great surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)