powerholding

darrylbowens46/powerholding

By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where all of it started in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for elearnportal.science the ingenious worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, 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 started in Sydney in February 2019 featured just 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, in fact, the uptake and variety 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 somewhere 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 excellent."

The concept of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the comparison is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors push the F50 hindering catamarans to their limits at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to just appeal to the avid sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport reasonable and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"Most of our fans are not avid sailors, and that's one of the reasons we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting individuals that similar to seeing a race, they do not need to comprehend anything about sailboats."

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

"I believe 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 crucial thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is likewise essential. We desire fans to come and have a great time and see some terrific racing."

Technological innovation is essential to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the usage of race organisers, teams and to assist broadcasters improve the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The huge 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 along with the Australian group in a race, and be able to look around anywhere they desire. That's the future."

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

A scarcity of F50s meant the French team 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 for that reason race for the very first time this weekend and wiki.eqoarevival.com among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all but among the groups are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

"We knew that that was the entire method the design was set up, that group 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 nice surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)