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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where everything began in Sydney this weekend and 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the innovative international sailing league.

An Olympic champion and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software business, allmy.bio to release the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply 5 rounds, iuridictum.pecina.cz 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 fantastic, in fact, 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 idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the contrast 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 appeal to the passionate sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"The majority of our fans are not passionate sailors, which is among the reasons that we have actually grown so rapidly. We are attracting individuals that just like watching a race, they don't 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 think you'll see several 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 viewing on broadcast ... however the fan experience on website is likewise critically important. We desire fans to come and have a terrific time and see some terrific racing."

Technological innovation is important to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of data points are communicated 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 increasingly employed to work through the mountain of information.

"The big 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 ride in addition to the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to take a look around anywhere they desire. That's the future."

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

A of F50s meant the French group 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 complete fleet of 12 boats will therefore race for the very first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however one of the teams are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

"These groups are now offering for $50 million, I would never ever have actually forecasted that this early on," said Coutts, who prepares to bring another couple of teams on board next year.

"We understood that that was the whole method the design was set up, that team owners would have the ability to trade their teams and ideally earn money out of it, but I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)