Porsche Penske Motorsport has won Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta for the first time and secured all three IMSA Michelin Endurance Championship honours.
Porsche Penske Motorsport has closed the 2026 IMSA season with a first overall victory at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta, taking Petit Le Mans after a ten-hour race shaped by sixteen full-course cautions. The result also completed a sweep of the IMSA Michelin Endurance Championship honours for Porsche’s factory programme.
Road Atlanta finally falls to the 963
The No. 6 Porsche 963 delivered the programme’s first overall Road Atlanta victory since Porsche Penske Motorsport began competing with the hybrid prototype in 2023. Laurens Vanthoor brought the car through heavy traffic and repeated caution periods, giving team-mate Kevin Estre his first IMSA victory.
The win carries extra weight because Road Atlanta had remained one of the major American circuits where the factory 963 programme had not yet won. Ending that gap at the season finale adds a defining result to a campaign that had been difficult enough to keep the championship picture uncertain until the closing round.
The endurance championship becomes the bigger prize
Alongside the race victory, Porsche claimed all three available honours in the IMSA Michelin Endurance Championship. The No. 7 crew of Felipe Nasr, Julien Andlauer and Laurin Heinrich secured the drivers’ recognition after a season that included endurance wins at Daytona and Sebring.
That consistency across the longer races shows a different kind of strength from a single-event victory. Endurance success demands reliability, traffic management, pit execution and driver depth over many hours, making the sweep an important measure of the 963 programme’s maturity.
Customer 911s also reach the podium
Porsche’s result was not limited to the prototype class. AO Racing finished second in GTD Pro with Nick Tandy, Harry King and Alessio Picariello, while Manthey 1st Phorm climbed from near the back of the GTD field to finish second with Ryan Hardwick, Riccardo Pera and Morris Schuring.
Those podiums put Porsche machinery inside the top three across all three classes in which it competed at the event. For a manufacturer whose motorsport identity depends heavily on customer racing as well as factory prototypes, that spread of results is as significant as the headline overall win.
A chaotic finale rewards control
Sixteen full-course cautions made the ten-hour race unusually fragmented, repeatedly compressing the field and forcing teams to reset strategy. In those conditions, outright pace had to be matched by clean restarts, disciplined pit work and the ability to avoid incidents in dense multi-class traffic.
Porsche emerged with the result it had been seeking at Road Atlanta and a broader endurance title sweep to accompany it. The season therefore ends with a strong demonstration of both factory and customer performance, giving the 963 and 911 GT3 R programmes a notable closing chapter for 2026.
Official sources: newsroom.porsche.com.
Source
Porsche Newsroom