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, Coutts sees a bright future for the innovative worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software application business, to introduce the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which started in Sydney in February 2019 included 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 simply remarkable, really, the uptake and variety of occasions 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 good.”

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 press the F50 hindering 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 try to make this sport reasonable and explainable for all sports fans,” Coutts added.

“The majority of our fans are not avid sailors, which is among the reasons why we have actually grown so quickly. We are attracting individuals that just like watching a race, they don’t 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 events this year now like that, perhaps even topping that,” said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

“The most important thing is the fans seeing on broadcast … but the fan experience on website is also critically important. We desire fans to come and have a great time and see some great racing.”

Technological development is essential to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are relayed from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, surgiteams.com groups and to assist broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

“The big 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 trip along with the Australian team in a race, and have the ability to browse wherever they desire. That’s the future.”

There have, of course, been challenges over the 6 years with the 2nd season interfered with by the COVID pandemic and wiki.tld-wars.space race days still sometimes at the mercy of wind conditions.

A shortage of F50s implied the French group was not able 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 full fleet of 12 boats will for that reason race for the first time this weekend and one of the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all but among the groups are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

“These groups are now offering for $50 million, I would never have anticipated that this at an early stage,” said Coutts, who prepares to bring another couple of groups on board next year.

“We understood that that was the entire method the model was set up, that team owners would have the ability 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, editing by Michael Perry)