Porsche’s Vanthoor On Top in Roar Night Practice

Laurens Vanthoor returned Porsche Penske Motorsport to the top of the Roar Before the Rolex 24 timesheets in Saturday evening’s night session.

Vanthoor left it until the final ten minutes of the two-hour session to post the fastest time of 1:37.239, knocking Wayne Taylor Racing’s Colton Herta off the top spot.

The IndyCar-turned-Formula 2 driver sat atop the order for the majority of the latter half of the session on a 1:37.342 set just before the one-hour mark before Vanthoor’s late improvement, which was some 0.690 seconds shy of his morning benchmark.

Herta’s WTR stablemate Will Stevens was third-fastest in the sister No. 10 car, 0.254 seconds off the pace, and 0.010 seconds clear of Laurin Heinrich, who was also a late improver in the second of the Penske Porsches.

Nico Pino made it three Porsches in the top five aboard the 2025-spec JDC-Miller Motorsports example ahead of Frederik Vesti’s Action Express Racing Cadillac.

In an extremely tight session that featured no major interruptions, ten of the 11 GTP cars were split by less than half a second, with the only outlier being the Heart of Racing Team Aston Martin Valkyrie that didn’t set a lap following its engine change.

LMP2 was topped by United Autosports’ No. 2 Oreca 07 Gibson courtesy of an early flyer from newly-signed McLaren Hypercar driver Mikkel Jensen.

The Danish driver’s best lap of 1:39.770 set early in the session stood for the duration, 0.351 seconds quicker than Nolan Siegel in the No. 343 Inter Europol Competition car.

Third in class was the second of the Inter Europol entries, the No. 43 car in which Antonio Felix da Costa set the best time.

IndyCar star Will Power led the way in the GTD Pro class in the 75 Express Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo as he set a fastest time of 1:47.673, eclipsing brand stablemate Fabian Schiller aboard the No. 69 GetSpeed Mercedes-AMG by 0.293 seconds.

Fastest in GTD and second-quickest GT car overall was the Myers Riley Motorsports Ford Mustang GT3 of Jenson Altzman.

Indy Dontje made it three Mercedes-AMGs in the top four in GT with the second-fastest time in GTD, ahead of Andrea Caldarelli’s GTD Pro class Pfaff Motorsports Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2.

Roar Before the 24 on-track action continues with Session 6 on Sunday morning at 9:45 a.m. ET, which will mark the final running for FIA Platinum, Gold and Silver-rated drivers for the weekend.

RESULTS: Session 5