Sailing-Bigger And Faster SailGP Back Where Everything Began In Sydney
By Nick Mulvenney
SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where it all began in Sydney this weekend and 6 years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for mariskamast.net the ingenious global 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 introduce the series with six teams all owned by the league.
While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply 5 rounds, this weekend's race will be the third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.
"It's simply incredible, really, the uptake and variety of events 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 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 visualchemy.gallery the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.
"We didn't set out to just appeal to the avid sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport easy to understand and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.
"Most of our fans are not passionate sailors, and that's one of the reasons we've grown so quickly. We are interesting people that much like enjoying a race, they do not need to understand anything about sailboats."
A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to watch Tom Slingsby's Australia group 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 crucial thing is the fans seeing on broadcast ... however the fan experience on site is also vitally crucial. We desire fans to come and have a great time and see some fantastic racing."
Technological innovation is essential to SailGP and numerous thousands of data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for using race organisers, groups and to assist broadcasters improve the viewer experience.
360 DEGREE VIEW
Coutts is excited about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively utilized to resolve the mountain of information.
"The huge advancement for us moving forward is the 360 degree view from on board the boat, with listening to the team comms," he said.
"The audience will be taken on board and trip in addition to the Australian team in a race, and be able to browse wherever they want. That's the future."
There have, of course, been over the six years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and forum.batman.gainedge.org race days still in some cases at the mercy of wind conditions.
A lack 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 therefore race for the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all but among the teams are, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr or pl.velo.wiki quickly will be, privately owned or run.
"These groups are now costing $50 million, I would never have predicted that this early," said Coutts, who prepares to bring another couple of groups on board next year.
"We understood that that was the whole way the model was set up, that group owners would have the ability to trade their groups and ideally make 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, editing by Michael Perry)