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By Nick Mulvenney

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

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software application company, to introduce the series with six teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which started in Sydney in February 2019 featured just five rounds, this weekend's race will be the third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's just incredible, in fact, the uptake and number 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 great."

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 best sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to just attract 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 avid sailors, and that's one of the reasons why we've grown so rapidly. We are appealing to people that just like enjoying a race, they do not need to comprehend anything about sailboats."

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

"I think 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 crucial thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... however the fan experience on website is also critically important. We desire fans to come and have a fantastic time and see some fantastic racing."

Technological development is essential to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of data points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for using race organisers, forum.pinoo.com.tr groups and to assist broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is delighted about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly utilized to resolve the mountain of information.

"The huge development for us moving 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 ride along with the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to look around anywhere they want. That's the future."

There have, obviously, been challenges over the six years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the grace of wind conditions.

A scarcity of F50s meant the French group was not able to complete at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and oke.zone damage to the boat once they got it ruled them out of the .

The complete 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 however one of the teams are, or soon will be, privately owned or run.

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

"We understood that that was the entire method the design was established, that team owners would have the ability to trade their teams and ideally earn money out of it, but I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)