Philip Ellis had been waiting for a gap that wasn’t coming. Then his championship rival made it for him. Ellis took the lead in the closing minutes of Sunday’s Michelin GT Challenge at VIRginia International Raceway when the driver he was chasing for the GTD lead pushed the No. 57 Mercedes-AMG GT3 off course while defending the position. A drive-through penalty followed. Ellis crossed the line first, and Winward Racing left Virginia with a 36-point championship advantage where it arrived 24 points out of first.
The VIR win is the team’s third in a row, following victories at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park in July and Road America earlier this month. Add the season-opening Rolex 24 at Daytona, and Ward and Ellis have won four of the year’s first eight races. The summer stretch has been flawless. What preceded it was not.
Winward held the GTD points lead going into March’s 12 Hours of Sebring and watched it disappear over the four races that followed. By the time the team arrived at Road America, the gap to the leaders had grown to nearly 300 points. A single weekend in Wisconsin recovered 183 of them. The 24-point deficit that remained became the 36-point lead Ward described Sunday: “The difference between first and second is about 30 points and it’s 20 points between second and third. That really means everybody is between two and three positions.” With Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta still to come, nobody in the GTD class is safe.
The mechanics of Sunday’s result started in Saturday qualifying, where Ward clocked third fastest and collected 30 championship points, cutting the gap to the then-leaders to 14 before a wheel turned in the race. Ward ran among the GTD leaders through his opening stint, briefly led a lap, and handed off to Ellis. The key sequence came with just under an hour remaining, when the Winward crew called Ellis in for his second and final stop. He rejoined in traffic and spent the next stretch hunting down the leader, using a GTD Pro car caught in class traffic as an inadvertent pace disruptor on the car ahead.
Ellis acknowledged afterward that the clean pass he wanted never materialized cleanly. “I tried to hunt him down and make use of the traffic in front of him,” he said. “I had one chance going into Turn 3, but overcooked it myself, and I think he just did the same thing when I was on the outside.” The contact sent the No. 57 briefly off course. Ellis kept it together, found the lead a few corners later, and held it to the flag. Ward framed the penalty as consistent enforcement: “It is just nice to see the IMSA officials stand up for what we were told in the drivers’ briefing.”
Sunday’s result also extended the Mercedes-AMG GT3’s strong record at the 3.27-mile Southern Virginia circuit. The car has now won five Michelin GT Challenge races at VIR outright, with victories in 2019, 2022, 2024, 2025, and 2026. Winward specifically has won the last two and three total since 2022.
The broader context makes the championship position notable. Ward and Ellis are the reigning GTD champions, having claimed back-to-back titles with Mercedes-AMG. Consecutive GTD championships are rare enough that the last driver to pull it off before this pair was Mario Farnbacher in 2019 and 2020. Winward is now chasing a third straight title, and the manufacturer and team standings are moving together: Mercedes-AMG leads the GTD Manufacturer Championship by 20 points, 2,634 to 2,614.
The Battle on the Bricks weekend at Indianapolis Motor Speedway runs September 18–20. Road Atlanta closes the season in October. A 36-point cushion sounds comfortable. In a class this tight, it is roughly one unlucky pit stop.
Source: Mercedes-Benz. Images courtesy of Mercedes-Benz.
