MONTEREY, Calif. — Strategy ruled the day in Sunday’s StubHub Monterey SportsCar Championship, the fourth race weekend of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season before a dramatic last-lap pass concluded the final lap at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
And on IMSA’s “Throwback” weekend in Monterey, JDC-Miller MotorSports turned back the clock for the No. 5 car’s best result in five years.
Laurin Heinrich made a last lap pass into Turn 5 of the 11-turn, 2.238-mile historic road course on Earl Bamber on the inside aboard the No. 5 JDC-Miller MotorSports Porsche 963 to get past the No. 31 Cadillac Whelen Cadillac V-Series.R for the Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) and overall win by 0.758 seconds. These two were in the best position after the final set of stops.
Heinrich shared the winning JDC-Miller entry with Tijmen van der Helm, for the team’s first win since the 2021 Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring – that year, JDC-Miller won with a DPi spec Cadillac DPi-V.R. Both cars sported a Mustang Sampling livery. The team’s previous best finish in GTP was third at Indianapolis in 2024.
It’s Heinrich’s third GTP win of the year split between two Porsche 963 cars, and his third consecutive win in Monterey after two straight wins in GTD PRO with AO Racing. Meanwhile, it’s van der Helm’s first IMSA victory.
In Grand Touring Daytona Pro (GTD PRO), Ford Racing scored its first win of the year as Frederic Vervisch and Christopher Mies captured the top spot in the No. 65 Ford Mustang GT3. In Grand Touring Daytona (GTD), Wayne Taylor Racing’s No. 45 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Evo2 of Trent Hindman and Danny Formal captured the flag.
In the first two-hour, 40-minute race of the season, the options deployed by all three classes ran the gamut before reaching a final crescendo in the final 15 minutes. That trio of new winners emerged once everything shook out with battles on track.
The prior GTP, GTD PRO and GTD leaders were all borderline on available fuel and virtual energy and as the race reached its conclusion, one-by-one they dropped away.
Tom Blomqvist was first to pull the pin in the overall and GTP leading No. 60 Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb Agajanian Acura ARX-06. After spending just over 36 seconds on pit lane with only a 27.8-second- ead, he fell back to fourth on exit from the pit lane.
The next set of dominos to fall came in GTD as the top two runners – Callum Ilott (No. 120 Wright Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R) and Scott Andrews (No. 19 van der Steur Racing Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo) – tried a gamble to run well over an hour but did not succeed. They pitted with 10 minutes to go.
Finally in GTD PRO, 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), waited until the final few minutes to do a final splash. De Phillippi was first with eight minutes to go from P4, followed a lap later by Tandy, Sims and Barnicoat.
With those stops complete, the action then turned to the battles on track. Heinrich made the pass on Bamber and Vervisch defended against Nicky Catsburg in the No. 4 Corvette. With the way traffic fell, Hindman had a lap to himself in GTD as the overall leader was in-between him and the rest of the podium runners.
