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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where it all started in Sydney this weekend and 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for funsilo.date the ingenious global sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts teamed up with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software application business, to launch the series with 6 teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which started in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply five rounds, this weekend's race will be the 3rd round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply fantastic, in fact, the uptake and variety 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 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 name and thatswhathappened.wiki the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"Most of our fans are not avid sailors, which's one of the reasons that we've grown so quickly. We are attracting people that similar to seeing a race, they do not need to understand anything about sailboats."

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

"The most essential thing is the fans viewing on broadcast ... however the fan experience on site is likewise extremely important. We want fans to come and have a good time and see some terrific racing."

Technological development 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 resolve 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 group comms," he said.

"The audience will be taken on board and ride in addition to the Australian team in a race, and have the ability to browse anywhere they want. That's the future."

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

A shortage of F50s implied the French group was unable to compete 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 first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however one of the teams are, or vetlek.ru soon will be, independently owned or run.

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

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