Laurin Heinrich has never lost a race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Three years running now, and the 24-year-old Porsche factory driver keeps finding ways to make the place bend to his will.
Sunday’s IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship sprint race looked like a Cadillac lock for most of its two hours and 40 minutes. Earl Bamber had the No. 31 Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R out front, running clean, running smart. Then Heinrich materialized in the JDC-Miller MotorSports Porsche 963 like something out of a ghost story, gaining half a second a lap in the closing stages with tire life nobody else could match.
He dispatched the No. 25 BMW M Hybrid V8 of Philipp Eng and Marco Wittmann into Turn 10 with 14 minutes left. That was the appetizer.
On the final lap, Heinrich went around the outside of Bamber through the right-hand Turns 3 and 4, then ducked inside on the run to Turn 5 and up the hill toward the Corkscrew. The gap at the flag was 0.758 seconds. It felt like a canyon.
The move invited comparisons to Alex Zanardi’s famous Corkscrew pass on Bryan Herta at the same circuit in 1996. Heinrich’s version was a few corners earlier and arguably just as audacious, executed against one of the best prototype drivers on the planet with a championship on the line.
Heinrich now leads the GTP driver standings by 21 points over Jack Aitken, Bamber’s co-driver in the No. 31 Cadillac. He’s 146 clear of his own Porsche Penske Motorsport teammates Felipe Nasr and Julien Andlauer, who limped home seventh. The factory operation’s endurance cup ringer is beating the factory operation.
That’s the tension at the heart of this story. JDC-Miller MotorSports is a privateer team, scrapping for years with the Porsche 963 before Heinrich’s arrival supercharged the program. Their last IMSA victory came at Sebring in 2021, in the old DPi era.
This was their first win in the modern GTP class, and it wasn’t a fluke born of attrition or strategy games. It was raw pace when it counted.
“We started here four years ago and didn’t have any idea what we were doing with this car,” said team principal John Church. The understatement landed.
Co-driver Tijmen van der Helm picked up his first IMSA victory and seemed genuinely stunned by the result. Heinrich credited Richard Westbrook, the veteran sports car hand who advises the team and apparently offered a tip about the final corner just two days before the race. That detail tells you everything about the margins in this series.
Bamber, to his credit, took the loss with clarity. “He just had much more grip than us at the end of the race,” he said. The No. 31 Cadillac has finished on the podium in all four 2026 races, three of them second places. That’s the kind of consistency that wins championships, except when someone like Heinrich keeps stealing the silverware.
Wittmann and Eng brought the BMW home third, 3.343 seconds back, a solid result after the No. 25 car’s rough outing at Long Beach where a collision wrecked a front-row start. The No. 60 Acura Meyer Shank entry finished fourth after a recovery drive from Tom Blomqvist and Colin Braun.
The series heads to Detroit May 29-30 for a 100-minute sprint on the street circuit, GTP and GTD PRO classes only. Cadillac will arrive as the establishment power. Heinrich will arrive as the man nobody can seem to beat when the laps wind down.
Three years at Laguna Seca. Three wins. Zero losses. The kid owns the place.
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