By Nick Mulvenney
SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where all of it started in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for the ingenious global sailing league.
An Olympic champion and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, utahsyardsale.com the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company, to introduce the series with six teams 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 just incredible, actually, 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 appearances excellent."
The idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and asystechnik.com the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.
"We didn't set out to just interest the passionate sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts included.
"The majority of our fans are not devoted sailors, and that is among the reasons that we have actually grown so rapidly. We are appealing to people that simply like enjoying a race, they don't need to comprehend anything about sailboats."
A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to enjoy Tom Slingsby's Australia group win the 2nd 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, bbarlock.com a 62-year-old New Zealander.
"The most important thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is also critically important. We desire fans to come and have a good time and see some fantastic racing."
Technological innovation is important to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, groups and to assist broadcasters improve the viewer experience.
360 DEGREE VIEW
Coutts is excited about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively employed to resolve 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 group comms," he said.
"The viewer will be taken on board and trip along with the Australian group in a race, and have the ability to take a look around any place they want. That's the future."
There have, asteroidsathome.net of course, been difficulties over the 6 years with the second season interrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the mercy of wind conditions.
A lack of F50s indicated the French group 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 one of the most pleasing elements for oke.zone Coutts is that all but one of the teams are, morphomics.science or quickly will be, privately owned or run.
"These teams are now offering for $50 million, I would never have actually anticipated that this early on," said Coutts, who prepares to bring another couple of teams on board next year.
"We understood that that was the entire method the model was established, that team owners would be able to trade their teams and hopefully generate income out of it, however I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a nice surprise." ( by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)
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Sailing-Bigger and Faster, SailGP Back where all of it Began In Sydney
Abe Pulver edited this page 2025-02-10 10:36:41 +01:00