MONTEREY, Calif. – For most of Sunday’s IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship sprint race, it appeared Cadillac would complete its domination of the StubHub Monterey SportsCar Championship weekend.
But never count out Porsche – on this day, the privately-run No. 5 JDC-Miller MotorSports Porsche 963 that Tijmen van der Helm and Laurin Heinrich drove to a giant-killing victory at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
Heinrich, who at age 24 is one of international sports car racing’s most prominent rising stars, stirred memories of the late Alex Zanardi’s performances at Laguna Seca as he forcefully moved from third to first as time counted down on the two-hour, 40-minute race clock.
He first made an authoritative pass on the No. 25 BMW M Team WRT BMW M Hybrid V8 of Philipp Eng and Marco Wittmann into Turn 10 for second place with 14 minutes remaining. Then on the final lap, he moved to the outside of Earl Bamber in the No. 31 Cadillac Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R through the right-hand Turns 3 and 4 before pulling ahead to the inside on the run to the Turn 5 lefthander and up the hill toward the Corkscrew.
Heinrich crossed the finish line 0.758 seconds ahead of Bamber, who shared the No. 31 Cadillac with Jack Aitken. Wittmann and co-driver Philipp Eng finished 3.343 seconds back in third place, just ahead of the No. 60 Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian Acura ARX-06 after a nice comeback drive from Tom Blomqvist and Colin Braun.
But the talking point after the race was Heinrich, who remarkably has never lost a race at WeatherTech Raceway. The last two years, he claimed Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) PRO class victories in AO Racing’s dinosaur-themed Porsche 911s. He started this year as the IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup co-driver in the factory No. 7 Porsche Penske Motorsport Porsche 963, taking overall and Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) class victories at the Rolex 24 At Daytona and the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring.
As a result of his latest win at Laguna Seca, Heinrich now leads the GTP driver championship standings by 21 points over Aitken and 146 points over his No. 7 Porsche teammates Felipe Nasr and Julien Andlauer, who finished seventh on Sunday.
It was the fifth WeatherTech Championship race win for JDC-Miller MotorSports, and the first in the modern GTP prototype era. The team’s last victory came in the Daytona Prototype international (DPi) class and overall at Sebring in 2021.
“It hasn’t sunk in 100 percent yet, but certainly this is one of the biggest wins,” said team principal John Church. “We started here four years ago and didn’t have any idea what we were doing with this car and have slowly been building and picking up the pace. We’ve been fighting an uphill battle the last couple years, so this is really special.
“It’s been great to have Laurin come along and give us some direction and some pace as well,” he added. “What a day – incredible! I couldn’t be happier.”
The JDC-Miller Porsche has shown speed before and notched the occasional podium finish. But the addition of the highly regarded Heinrich, a Porsche factory driver, has supplied an extra boost.
“This place seems to work for me and I love it, to be honest,” Heinrich said. “Every time I come here in the morning and see this track, I feel something special. The team has given Tijmen and me an extremely strong car, extremely well balanced. I think our strength was tires, which we could really make use of in the last four or five laps. The strategy also worked great. To have all this work pay off is incredible.
“We were pushing flat out and that was all we had,” he concluded. “To have something like that happen on the last lap makes it a magic day.”
Added van der Helm: “It’s great. I wasn’t expecting it at all 30 minutes before the finish. Laurin did some great stuff at the end of the race, and this is an incredible day for the entire team.”
Heinrich also gave credit to sports car ace Richard Westbrook, who has driven the Porsche 963 for JDC-Miler Motorsports in the recent past and serves as an advisor for the team.
“He knows exactly what it feels like in this car and I’m amazed how when he sees the live data, he knows exactly what’s going on in the car,” Heinrich said of the three-time Laguna Seca race winner. “Two days ago, he told me something about the last corner that helped me today to set up the last move. Honestly, it’s a big help for the team.”
Bamber was philosophical after Heinrich got the best of him on the final lap. The No. 31 Cadillac has finished on the podium in all four WeatherTech Championship races in 2026, including three second-place finishes, after closing out the ‘25 season with a pair of wins.
“With about 10 laps to go, the (No.) 5 just appeared out of nowhere and when I heard it was coming at half of a second a lap, I knew it was going to be tough to hold him off,” Bamber said. “I got a couple of good runs through traffic on the last second-to-last lap, but then he just had much more grip than us at the end of the race.
“I raced him hard and fair, but he just got through. It is what it is – another great podium and it was great to race with Laurin. I’ve seen him come up through the ranks with Porsche, and to see him get this win with the No. 5 team is something special.”
The next round of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship is the May 29-30 Chevrolet Detroit Sports Car Classic, a 100-minute street course sprint race featuring the GTP and Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO) classes.
Ford Evolves its Performance and Car En Route to Monterey IMSA GTD PRO Win
For Ford Racing at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, the more things change, the more they stay the same in the top Grand Touring class of IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Ten years ago in 2016 in Monterey, Ford scored a dramatic, strategic win that marked the first for the modern era for its new Ford GT in the former all-pro GT Le Mans class. A decade later, Ford has now scored its first dramatic, strategic win with its new evo version of the Ford Mustang GT3 in the all-pro Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO) class during Sunday’s StubHub Monterey SportsCar Championship.
Frederic Vervisch and Christopher Mies did the honors aboard the No. 65 Ford Racing Ford Mustang GT3, with both drivers winning for the first time since the 2025 Rolex 24 At Daytona.
That 2016 win in the Ford GT came courtesy of a massive fuel save run authored by Richard Westbrook, sharing the car with Ryan Briscoe in a two-hour race. This win today came because Vervisch didn’t need to save fuel while most of their GTD PRO rivals did.
“We knew they were hoping for yellow; I think about 70 minutes before the end of the race, we knew they’d have to pit for fuel,” Vervisch said. “But they were still driving! We had to wait to see if they’d go into pit lane, they did, so it was a nice feeling.”
It appeared as though the win would come down to any of Nick Tandy (No. 77 AO Racing Porsche 911 GT3 R (992)), Alexander Sims (No. 3 Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports Corvette Z06 GT3.R), Ben Barnicoat (No. 14 Vasser Sullivan Racing Lexus RC F GT3) and Connor De Phillippi (No. 1 Paul Miller Racing BMW M4 GT3 EVO), in the top four spots. Combined, those four cars led the first 104 laps in the two-hour, 40-minute race.
If AO’s “Sketchy,” Corvette’s 2000 C5-R livery or PMR’s 1975 BMW CSL scheme won the race, it would have ensured one of the retro liveries would win on IMSA’s “Throwback” weekend.
And then, the reality emerged none of those cars had enough available energy to make the finish as their stints ran more than an hour, approaching 70 minutes, heading into the race’s final 10 minutes. Vervisch had pitted with just over an hour remaining, so had time in hand.
De Phillippi was first with eight minutes to go from P4, followed a lap later by Tandy, Sims and Barnicoat.
That promoted Vervisch to the lead, and although the second Corvette driven by Nicky Catsburg came close, the Dutchman was unable to pass the Belgian. Vervisch won the race by 1.277 seconds, while Catsburg and Tommy Milner came up second in the No. 4 Corvette. AO’s pair of Tandy and Harry King still grabbed the final podium spot in third.
The 2026 Ford features the aforementioned new evo kit, new team name (Ford Racing instead of Ford Multimatic Motorsports), a new livery (full blue and white compared to a dark blue, white and red) and a new full-season driver lineup in the No. 64 car (Ben Barker and Dennis Olsen instead of Mike Rockenfeller and Seb Priaulx).
As Mies explained, the strides made with the evo kit have begun to pay off in their third race, particularly at this track
“We brought our evo package for this year so it finally paid off,” Mies said. “Last year we got lapped here on pure pace. We were quite afraid something like that might happen again. But I would say after a tough start to the season, and what we thought could be a quite difficult race, we had a good result for the team.”
Catsburg and Milner’s consistency with their second podium in three races to start 2026 have propelled them into the GTD PRO championship lead. Unofficially, the No. 4 Corvette pair leads De Phillippi and Neil Verhagen by 51 points, King and Tandy by 63 and Monterey winners Vervisch and Mies by 74.
GTD PRO races next at its lone street course race of 2026, the Chevrolet Detroit Sports Car Classic, May 29-30.
