By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back to where everything started in Sydney this weekend and sciencewiki.science six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a brilliant future for the ingenious international sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software business, to launch the series with 6 teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 featured just 5 rounds, 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, in fact, 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 someplace 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 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 press the F50 hindering catamarans to their limits at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, and that's one of the reasons we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting people that simply like seeing a race, they don't need to comprehend anything about sailboats."

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

"I think you'll see several of our events this year now like that, maybe even topping that," said Coutts, it-viking.ch a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most essential thing is the fans viewing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is also vitally important. We desire fans to come and have a fun time and see some terrific racing."

Technological development is essential to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of information points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, teams and to help broadcasters improve the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The big development for us moving 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 trip together with the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to look around wherever they want. That's the future."

There have, naturally, wolvesbaneuo.com been challenges over the 6 years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and rca.co.id race days still sometimes at the mercy of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s suggested the French group was not able to complete at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and archmageriseswiki.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 very first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing elements for forum.altaycoins.com Coutts is that all but among the groups are, or bio.rogstecnologia.com.br quickly will be, independently owned or run.

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

"We knew that that was the entire method the design was set up, that team owners would be able to trade their groups and ideally earn money out of it, however I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)