Sailing-Bigger and Faster, SailGP Back where it all Began In Sydney
By Nick Mulvenney
SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP go back to where everything began in Sydney this and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the innovative global sailing league.
An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts partnered with Larry Ellison, the billionaire creator of the Oracle software application company, to release the series with 6 teams all owned by the league.
While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply five 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, 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 wish to get to. So yeah, the future appearances good."
The idea 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 limitations at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.
"We didn't set out to simply attract the devoted 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, and that's one of the reasons that we've grown so quickly. We are interesting individuals that similar to viewing a race, they don't need to comprehend anything about sailboats."
A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to view Tom Slingsby's 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 essential thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... however the fan experience on website is also vitally important. We desire fans to come and have a fun time and see some fantastic racing."
Technological innovation is important to SailGP and numerous countless information points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, groups and lespoetesbizarres.free.fr to help broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.
360 DEGREE VIEW
Coutts is excited about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively used to work through the mountain of information.
"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 audience will be taken on board and ride in addition to the Australian team in a race, and have the ability to browse any place they desire. That's the future."
There have, macphersonwiki.mywikis.wiki obviously, been difficulties over the six years with the second season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and setiathome.berkeley.edu race days still in some cases at the grace of wind conditions.
A lack of F50s suggested the French team was not able to complete 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 complete fleet of 12 boats will for pipewiki.org that reason race for the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all but among the teams are, addsub.wiki or bphomesteading.com quickly will be, independently owned or run.
"These groups are now costing $50 million, I would never ever have forecasted that this early on," said Coutts, who plans to bring another couple of groups on board next year.
"We understood that that was the entire way the model was established, that team owners would be able to trade their groups and ideally generate income out of it, but I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)