Sean Edwards attended the 2nd official FIA GT3 test at Paul Ricard this week. He was joined along with a few other drivers looking too land the Porsche seats with Tech 9. “The test went really well” commented Edwards, the 2 days consisted of running in 2 new 997’s and in the 3rd sessions of the days setting some flying laps round the track. Sean completed the 2 days without incident and set a very respectable time of 2.14.2 round the French track as seen below.

Paul Ricard, Tech 9 Team’s Posche Test Times.
Andy Topmson – 2.13.863 (old rubber, 8 flying laps)
Sean Edwards – 2.14.213 (old rubber, 2 flying laps)
Paul Van Splunteren – 2.15.090 (2 sets of new tyres, 20 flying laps)
James Murphy – 2.15.462 (semi old rubber, 8 flying laps)
Demitry Deverikos – 2.15.652 (new ish rubber, 8 flying laps)
Phil Hindley – 2.17.158 (old rubber, 1st laps at the track, 7 flying laps)
Maxime Dumarey – 2.19.068 (new ish rubber, 16 flying laps)
Oliver Bryant – 2.22.466 (old rubber and 7000 max rpm)

Sean Edwards is in talks with the Trackspeed/Tech9 partnership that is looking to get contract to run 3 Porsche 997’s in the FIA GT3 championship next year. Edwards said “If they get this contract it is going to be pretty likely that we make a deal to run in one of the 997’s next year”. This new championship is going to be an important step into Europe if Edwards does the deal.

Sean Edwards is in talks with the Barewell motor sport team who is going to be running 3 Aston Martin DBRS9’s next year, in the FIA GT3 championship. Edwards said “we are looking strongly at this new FIA GT3 championship for next year. It’s looking like the best championship to introduce myself into the European scene”.

Sean Edwards is in talks with Tech9, Trackspeed, RPM and Motorbase to run in the British GT championship in 2006. If a deal comes off he will be running the now dominant Porsche 996 GT3 cup car. They look to make a decision on what series/team they are going to driver for at the end of December/ beginning of January. Edwards said “2 teams stand out, it’s now all about which team can find the best co driver for me, so we can win the championship”

The 2nd race was at 1.30 on Sunday, it was bone dry and Warburton started the race. It was going to be hard for the duo to make their way up the field after the bad qualifying. The team had a good strategy for the race, but it depended on how fast Warburton could get passed everyone! Both cars had been repaired from last night’s incident, as the team worked all through the night, they did a great job!

Steve started the race and did a good job getting from 8th to 6th before handing over to me, I jumped in and 1st gear would not select, eventually after a while I pulled away in 2nd after loosing numerous amount of seconds. I then started pushing really hard, trying too make the positions back up.

I gained rapidly and picked of the positions one by one, I made it up to 4th with 10 min to go. Disaster almost struck as the Vauxhall Monaro was stationary on the apex of beckets and I had to take avoiding action at 150mph onto the grass! Luckily I escaped with only lost time.

I was pushing as hard as I could go in the last 10 min and made it all the way up to 2nd in the INV class! It was a good results considering where we had started and to be honest I was glad to finish the race after being taken out of the last two!

We are looking too next season now and there are several different options open at the moment, but we will have too see how it goes over the winter. We will try to raise the budget to do a full season of GT racing and go out with the sole aim of winning the championship.