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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back 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 forum.batman.gainedge.org the innovative worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts teamed up with Larry Ellison, parentingliteracy.com the billionaire founder of the Oracle software business, to launch the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 included simply five 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 fantastic, actually, the uptake and number of events now," SailGP chief executive 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 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 concept of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and sincansaglik.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 awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to simply interest the devoted sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"Most of our fans are not devoted sailors, and that is among the reasons that we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting individuals that much like enjoying a race, they do not need to comprehend anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to watch Tom Slingsby's Australia team 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 important thing is the fans watching on broadcast ... however the fan experience on website is also critically important. We want fans to come and have a fantastic time and see some fantastic racing."

is important to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of information points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, securityholes.science groups and to assist broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is excited about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly used 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 viewer will be taken on board and trip along with the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to take a look around wherever they desire. That's the future."

There have, naturally, prawattasao.awardspace.info been difficulties 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 shortage of F50s indicated the French group was unable 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 complete fleet of 12 boats will therefore race for the first time this weekend and among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however among the groups are, or quickly will be, independently owned or run.

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

"We understood that that was the whole way the model was set up, that team owners would be able to trade their teams and hopefully make cash out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)