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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back to where it all began in Sydney this weekend and 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for the ingenious worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts teamed up with Larry Ellison, the of the Oracle software company, to release 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 third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's just remarkable, in fact, the uptake and variety of events now," SailGP president 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 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 appearances great."

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 best sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits 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 reasonable and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts included.

"The majority of our fans are not devoted sailors, and that is among the reasons that we have actually grown so rapidly. We are attracting individuals that just like enjoying a race, they do not need to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out to view Tom Slingsby's Australia group win the 2nd round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I believe 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 essential thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is likewise essential. We want fans to come and have an excellent time and see some terrific racing."

Technological development is essential to SailGP and hundreds of countless information points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for the usage of race organisers, teams and addsub.wiki to assist broadcasters improve the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is thrilled about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is significantly employed to resolve the mountain of information.

"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 viewer will be taken on board and ride along with the Australian group in a race, and be able to browse anywhere they want. That's the future."

There have, obviously, been obstacles over the 6 years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the grace of wind conditions.

A shortage of F50s indicated the French team was unable 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 for that reason race for the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for gratisafhalen.be Coutts is that all however among the teams are, utahsyardsale.com or soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

"We knew that that was the whole way the model was established, that team owners would have the ability to trade their groups and hopefully make money 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)