By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where all of it started in Sydney this weekend and vetlek.ru 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the ingenious worldwide sailing league.

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

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 included simply 5 rounds, oke.zone 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 simply incredible, in fact, the uptake and variety of occasions now," SailGP chief executive 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 someplace around 20. If you compare that to Formula One that has 24, that's sort of where we desire 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 best sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are spectacular speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, which is among the factors why we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting people that much like seeing 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 team 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 important thing is the fans viewing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on website is likewise essential. We want fans to come and have a good time and see some great 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 making use of race organisers, teams and to assist broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The big 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 have the ability to browse wherever they desire. That's the future."

There have, obviously, been challenges over the six years with the 2nd season interrupted by the COVID pandemic and trademarketclassifieds.com race days still in some cases at the grace of wind conditions.

A scarcity 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 complete fleet of 12 boats will therefore race for the first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however among the groups are, or quickly will be, privately owned or run.

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

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