1,000 Greatest Drivers: Sean Edwards
Because I've got to have at least one Sean, don't I?
No, that’s not why I listed him. I listed him because he deserves it, but that’s a funny tagline. One of the things I have perpetually noticed ever since I first took the global analysis of racing drivers seriously in 2015 was how consistently underrated Porsche Supercup drivers are. The series gets next to no attention probably because it is a support series for the European rounds of F1. Since F1 is significantly paywalled and scrupulously blocks most footage from being available online, the same holds true for most of the series that support F1 including Porsche Supercup. However, pirates and torrenters can still pretty easily find F1 footage for free if they want to. Porsche Supercup is much harder because it has an extremely niche fanbase, and niche series don’t tend to attract a lot of attention if they are not available on YouTube, so the stars in that series tend to have a larger gap between their talent and their reputation than those of any other series, at least until they become major league sports car stars afterward, which many of them do. When Edwards was racing in Porsche Supercup and its subsidiary series Porsche Carrera Cup Germany (most of the Porsche Supercup title contenders also compete in PCC Germany simultaneously, so that’s effectively a major league also), he was pretty much interchangeable with René Rast and Kévin Estre. Yes, they were both a little higher rated in my model, but they were all within .067 of each other, so they were reasonably close, and as I reveal below, Edwards actually beat Rast in their head-to-head in 2012 PCC Germany even though he narrowly lost the title, and that year Estre finished behind both of them in points. When you consider that not long after this, Rast became a dominant juggernaut in DTM and Estre became one of the top tier sports car drivers of this day (to the point of being the presumed WEC Prototype champion as we speak), it’s hard not to think this was a major, major loss, maybe the biggest one that decade.
As much as I loved Dan Wheldon (who I will be writing about tomorrow) and Justin Wilson (who I previously wrote about) and think they were great, it did seem like most of their greatness was already in the past as they had both been fading for a couple years before they died. Although their losses were deeply tragic, it’s hard for me to envision an alternate history where either of them would have won more than a couple IndyCar races afterward since they were really falling off. Edwards is much more like Jules Bianchi because we might not have seen his full potential. When you consider that he and Estre were basically interchangeable in Porsche Supercup and that Edwards was already starting to be the team leader for winning endurance race entries, it’s hard not to think that he would still be one of the top sports car drivers right now if he hadn’t died and would have likely gone on to be one of the best sports car drivers of his generation, while in retrospect Wheldon and Wilson were probably second-tier legends either way: they were not going to end up in that top tier with Scott Dixon/Will Power/Dario Franchitti/Josef Newgarden/etc… But Edwards might have, so this to me is even more tragic. Especially since even many hardcore racing fans might not know who he is.
