By Nick Mulvenney
SYDNEY, garagesale.es Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back to where it all started in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a brilliant future for the ingenious international sailing league.
An Olympic champion and of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software application company, to release the series with 6 groups all owned by the league.
While the inaugural season which started in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply 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 incredible, actually, the uptake and variety of events 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 want to get to. So yeah, the future looks 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 finest sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are spectacular speeds for waterborne vessels.
"We didn't set out to simply appeal to the avid sailing fan, we try to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts included.
"The majority of our fans are not passionate sailors, which's one of the reasons we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting people that similar to enjoying a race, they do not have to understand anything about sailboats."
A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to view Tom Slingsby's Australia team win the 2nd round of the series in Auckland last month.
"I think you'll see numerous of our events this year now like that, perhaps even topping that," said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.
"The most essential thing is the fans seeing on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is likewise essential. We want fans to come and have a good time and see some excellent racing."
Technological development is important to SailGP and numerous countless data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, teams and to help broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.
360 DEGREE VIEW
Coutts is delighted about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly utilized to work through the mountain of data.
"The big development 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 ride in addition to the Australian group in a race, and be able to look around anywhere they want. That's the future."
There have, naturally, been challenges over the six years with the 2nd season interfered with by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the grace of wind conditions.
A shortage of F50s indicated the French team was unable to compete 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 therefore race for the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all but among the groups are, or quickly will be, independently owned or run.
"These groups are now offering for $50 million, I would never ever have anticipated that this early," said Coutts, who plans to bring another couple 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 groups and hopefully generate income out of it, but I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)
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Sailing Bigger and Faster, SailGP Back where it all Began In Sydney
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