In 2013, English racer Sean Edwards was well down the path to becoming a Porsche factory driver. In his fifth season of Porsche Supercup racing, Edwards was leading the championship and very likely to take the title headed to the final round in November. That had followed years of hard work and success in Porsche racing series, including second-place championship finishes in the extremely deep Porsche Carrera Cup Germany field. But on October 15, 2013, Sean Edwards died in Australia while instructing at Queensland Raceway. There would be no championship and, more tragically, no more of Edwards’ trademark determination.
The details of the accident aren’t particularly important to recalling Sean’s legacy; if you want to find that information, it unfortunately is the first thing that comes up on a web search. What is important is recalling what he accomplished in his short career and the potential that was lost with him.
Edwards’ father, Guy, raced professionally at Le Mans and in Formula 1 and his son began following in his footsteps in high-level karting by his 12th birthday. He had soon moved to single-seaters and by 2005—at 18 years old—he was racing Porsche Cup cars. After just two seasons, Sean won his first title in a Porsche, the 2006 FIA GT3 European Championship, and would soon find himself driving Porsches (and later other GT cars) all over the world. He was competing in the Porsche Supercup—the Formula 1 support series—by 2008 and finishing 5th in the championship as a rookie. Sean carried on in Supercup and anywhere else a Porsche team needed a young hotshoe. In the highly competitive Porsche Carrera Cup Germany, he raced hard against current Porsche factory drivers Nick Tandy and Kevin Estre.
Edwards was one of the first professional racers to embrace sim racing as a legitimate form of practicing the craft and was popular with the online sim-racing world because of it. The proliferation of Nissan’s GT Academy has edified that concept but Edwards was something of a pioneer in that regard. Sim racers even held a Sean Edwards Memorial race where the field was comprised entirely of Porsche Cup cars with liveries that Edwards had raced. No, it’s not a 21-gun salute, but it speaks to the breadth of the people with whom the budding superstar interacted and the respect he engendered.
He also played his father and drove his father’s Hesketh-Ford in the 2013 film Rush about the Formula 1 rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Sean’s father, Guy, was one of several drivers who pulled Lauda from his near-fatal crash at the 1976 German Grand Prix.
The year 2013 looked to be Edwards finding his pinnacle. He had co-driven to win in that year’s 24 Hours of the Nurburgring just a few months after also winning his second consecutive 24 Hours of Dubai title in a Mercedes SLS GT3 car. Coupled with what seemed an imminent Porsche Supercup title, a factory-backed GT racing job—likely with Porsche—was surely in the cards. It’s not hard to imagine Edwards anchoring the Porsche’s current GT program(s) as part of the young Porsche crowd like Frédéric Makowiecki and Earl Bamber, but it was not to be.
NGT Motorsports had hired Edwards to race in the American Le Mans Series’ GTC class—an all-Porsche category—and his death came just days before the final ALMS race, Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta. The series honored Edwards at the final race and NGT replaced their MOMO livery with a simple tribute to their late driver.
After his death, Edwards’ family established the Sean Edward Foundation to improve racing safety and establish mentoring programs for young race car drivers. They hold an annual bicycle race around the Monaco Grand Prix Circuit and work toward improving safety both on racing circuits and in race cars.
To get an idea of how good Edwards was at his craft, here is a snippet of Kevin Estre racing hard against Sean (in the yellow-and-black car) at the Nurburgring during a Porsche Carrera Cup Germany race. He races Estre hard but fair, which was always the case for the young British driver. And if you didn’t read it at the time, go back and read Chris Harris’ thoughts from 2013 on Sean Edwards to understand the depth of that loss.
