By Nick Mulvenney

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

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

While the inaugural season which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 included simply 5 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 simply amazing, actually, the uptake and variety of occasions 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 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 good."

The concept 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 attract the avid sailing fan, we try to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, which's one of the factors why we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting people that much like enjoying a race, they do not have to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out to see Australia group win the second round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I believe you'll see numerous of our occasions this year now like that, perhaps 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 also critically important. We want fans to come and have a fun time and see some terrific racing."

Technological development is essential to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, teams and to assist broadcasters improve the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

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

"The huge advancement 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 trip in addition to the Australian team in a race, and have the ability to take a look around anywhere they desire. That's the future."

There have, naturally, been challenges over the 6 years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still often at the grace of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s implied the French group was unable to complete at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and drapia.org 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 very first time this weekend and wakewiki.de among the most pleasing elements for forum.altaycoins.com Coutts is that all however one of the groups are, or hikvisiondb.webcam soon will be, privately owned or run.

"These teams are now offering for $50 million, I would never have actually predicted that this at an early stage," said Coutts, who prepares to bring another number of groups on board next year.

"We understood that that was the whole way the model was established, that group owners would be able to trade their teams and ideally earn money out of it, however I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)