DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Over the last three years, watching the Porsche Penske Motorsport driver lineups evolve in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship has sometimes been a dizzying experience.
That experience essentially created a high-profile game of musical chairs when Porsche opted to focus solely on IMSA and withdraw from WEC for 2026, which took up to six driver seats off the table.
When the music stopped, only one of Porsche Penske Motorsport’s four 2025 full-season IMSA Grand Touring Prototype drivers emerged back in the same chair for 2026: three-time top-class IMSA prototype champion Felipe Nasr.
Mathieu Jaminet (moved to Genesis), Matt Campbell (shifted to a Michelin Endurance Cup role) and Nick Tandy (reassigned to GT with AO Racing’s No. 77 “Rexy” Porsche 911 GT3 R) are in new roles. But showing Porsche and Penske’s strength in numbers, past WEC champions Kevin Estre and Laurens Vanthoor returned to America, Julien Andlauer stepped into a full-time role and Laurin Heinrich has been promoted to a Michelin Endurance Cup seat.
Roger Penske described the changes succinctly during a Rolex 24 Porsche media roundtable: “Now, we have Estre and Vanthoor here with Campbell. We have Andlauer and Laurin coming in. And Felipe has been a standard bearer for us.”
Nasr and Campbell’s new teammates aren’t new to IMSA, but they may need to reintroduce themselves in their IMSA GTP roles. Here’s how they advanced to the very top of the sports car racing pyramid with Porsche and Penske:
Kevin Estre
At 37, Estre is the oldest member of the Porsche lineup, with a factory association dating to 2016 (seen right with Vanthoor in 2017, when the two were IMSA GT Le Mans teammates with Porsche). Estre won the Porsche Carrera Cup in France in 2011 and Germany two years later, and he also claimed the 2019 LMGTE Pro (similar to IMSA’s GTD PRO) class championship in the FIA WEC.
Vanthoor and Estre are the only two drivers who drove in all 23 FIA WEC races for Porsche Penske Motorsport over the last three years. Teamed together with Andre Lotterer, they claimed the 2024 Hypercar championship with wins at Losail, Qatar and Fuji, Japan. Estre, Vanthoor and Campbell added another WEC race win at the 2025 Lone Star Le Mans at Circuit of The Americas near Austin, Texas.
This year’s Rolex 24 marked Estre’s 24th career IMSA start; he has eight career podiums but surprisingly, no wins. An eight-start season in a Park Place Motorsports Porsche 911 GT America in 2014 marked his most active season and he’s eager to tackle his first full WeatherTech Championship campaign.
“There will be new challenges, things very different to WEC between races and race tracks,” Estre said. “I feel a bit like a rookie, but joining the winning team, keeping Laurens with me, and also our performance engineer, it feels a bit of a WEC spirit in there. We’ve been together and won races and championships, so it was an easy call.”
With GT- and prototype-level championships in WEC under his belt, taking an IMSA crown is one of the few achievements left for him to chase.
“I’m really proud of what’s been achieved, but I want to win more – like all of us,” he said. “It’s been an amazing journey, starting in GT. I’ve been in many different cars, all the racing cars Porsche has had. I’ve been fortunate to win in all the cars – championships or big races, a big part of Porsche history in motorsport.
“I’m really happy, and a full season of IMSA with Porsche was missing on my bucket list. We had to tick that off, and hopefully it’s a good signal.”
Laurens Vanthoor
Affectionately known within the Penske Porsche Motorsport team as “Larry,” Laurens Vanthoor is no stranger to IMSA fans. In fact, he’s won a total of 13 times in WeatherTech Championship competition, including overall and GTP class victories in the 2024 and ’25 Rolex 24 and the ‘2025 Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring. Vanthoor was also part of IMSA championship-winning efforts for the Porsche factory (GT Le Mans, 2019) and Pfaff Motorsports (GTD, 2021).
But after racing a Porsche 963 full-time for Porsche Penske Motorsport (winning the Hypercar championship in 2024) while maintaining a glittering international record driving GT-class Porsches, a full-time assault on IMSA’s top class is one of the few mountains Vanthoor has left to climb. Fourth was a tough outcome for the No. 6 car at the Rolex 24.
“The frustrating part is the whole ‘Roar Before the 24’ and race lead up, everything was so smooth,” Vanthoor said on the ‘Over the Limit’ podcast he produces with his brother Dries, who drives for BMW M Team WRT in the WeatherTech Championship.
“I’m not saying we were quick or not, but everything we were testing was making sense and working, and all the drivers were happy. The car was good and we were actually super-relaxed. But in Hour 2, we suffered big damage when Kevin was in the car and an LMP2 T-boned him in the side. We had a big hole in the sidepod and in the floor. We definitely lost some performance.”
Julien Andlauer
Andlauer has been on a fast track up the Porsche ladder since he started racing in the Carrera Cup France in 2016. He won the championship in 2017, then became the youngest-ever class winner at the 2018 24 Hours of Le Mans, where one of his LMGTE Am class teammates was Campbell.
Andlauer then won the 2019 Carrera Cup Germany to earn Porsche Young Professional status in 2020. By 2024, he was driving a privately entered Porsche 963 in the WEC for Proton Competition before being promoted to a factory Porsche Penske Motorsport WEC entry in 2025. Teamed mainly with Michael Christensen, he impressed enough to land one of the coveted full-time PPM seats in IMSA for 2026. Needless to say, the last few years have been a whirlwind.
“It’s been an amazing last two or three years, I have to say, stepping up into a factory program,” Andlauer said. “I think I packed a lot into a backpack of learning the last two years. Now I’m with the big dogs, sharing the car with them, learning and competing with them. PPM have been so successful over the past few years, which is fantastic. Hopefully we’ll continue this year.”
Andlauer earned three GTD class podiums in 13 IMSA starts (all in 2023 with Kellymoss with Riley) before being part of the winning team with Nasr and Heinrich in the No. 7 Porsche in this year’s season-opening Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway. But he still hasn’t completed a full season in the WeatherTech Championship and understands that there is much to learn.
“It’s not easy to be fast; it’s not so easy to be competitive and not so easy either to win a race,” Andlauer said. “But it’s clearly very difficult to win a championship. What we saw with the No. 6 car is they won only one or two races last year, but they were always in the top four or five all season long. This is what counts, especially when there is no difference in points between a 24-hour race and a 1-1/2-hour race.”
Laurin Heinrich
If AO Racing team co-owner Gunnar Jeanette had his druthers, he’d still have Laurin Heinrich on his driver roster. But Heinrich demonstrated so much promise and potential on the way to winning five races and the 2024 IMSA GTD PRO title during two years behind the wheel of AO’s iconic ‘Rexy’ Porsche 911 GT3 R that he earned a chance to become a factory prototype driver for the marque by the time he turned 23.
Heinrich passed his Porsche 963 audition in the 2025 FIA WEC season finale at Bahrain and is now embarking on his rookie GTP campaign in IMSA with a Michelin Endurance Cup program in PPM’s No. 7 with Nasr and Andlauer at the three longest rounds at Daytona International Speedway (24 hours), Sebring International Raceway (12) and Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta (10). It started with an overall victory, the third consecutive in the Rolex 24 for Nasr and the No. 7 Porsche.
“It’s incredible to stand here today; the journey has been so quick,” said Heinrich, who ran a single season of open-wheel Formula 4 in a small family-run team before switching to sports cars and advancing up the Porsche ladder. “I mean, this is a childhood dream. I know my father was probably glued to the screen watching.
“When I think back how we raced then and how I’m racing nowadays, it’s an incredible journey,” he added. “It makes me extremely proud, but also thankful for the opportunity that Porsche provides us young talent going through the junior ranks, Cup racing, and now being a factory driver.”
