greenhedgehog

By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back to where everything started in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright 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 founder of the Oracle software application company, to release 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 object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply fantastic, actually, the uptake and variety 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 desire 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 contrast is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors press the F50 hindering catamarans to their limits at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, which's one of the factors why we've grown so rapidly. We are attracting individuals that similar to seeing 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 2nd 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 crucial thing is the fans viewing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is also vitally important. We want fans to come and have a fantastic time and see some great racing."

Technological innovation is integral to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for yewiki.org using race organisers, groups and to help broadcasters improve the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The huge advancement 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 together 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 interfered with by the COVID pandemic and race days still often at the mercy of wind conditions.

A shortage of F50s indicated the French team 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 very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all however among the groups are, or soon will be, or run.

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

"We understood that that was the entire way the model was set up, that team owners would be able to trade their teams and ideally generate income out of it, however I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)