By Nick Mulvenney

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

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software application business, morphomics.science to launch the series with six 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 just amazing, really, the uptake and number of occasions 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 appearances excellent."

The idea 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 hindering catamarans to their limits at what are spectacular speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"Most of our fans are not avid sailors, which is among the reasons why we've grown so quickly. We are attracting individuals that similar to watching a race, they do not need to understand anything about sailboats."

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

"The most essential thing is the fans watching on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is likewise extremely crucial. We want fans to come and have a fun time and see some fantastic racing."

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

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is thrilled about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is significantly utilized to resolve the mountain of data.

"The huge development for us going 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 together with the Australian team in a race, and be able to browse any place they want. That's the future."

There have, wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de naturally, been challenges over the 6 years with the second season interfered with by the and race days still in some cases at the grace of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s meant the French group was not able to complete 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 first time this weekend and among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however one of the teams are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

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

"We knew that that was the entire way the design was set up, that team owners would have the ability to trade their teams and hopefully earn money out of it, however I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a great surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)