Philip Ellis flew to his own engagement party in St. Louis on Friday night, caught a few hours of sleep in a hotel near Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta by 2:30 a.m. Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon stood on the top step of the podium with a 91-year-old Greek father who had just watched his son win for the first time.
That’s the weekend JMF Motorsports had at Road Atlanta. And the racing was almost as wild as the logistics.
Jason Daskalos and Ellis drove the No. 27 Mercedes-AMG GT3 to a convincing overall and Pro-Am class victory in Sunday’s three-hour GT World Challenge America race, winning by 2.525 seconds after a gutsy pre-race call that most of the field got wrong. Heavy rain fell just before the start. The No. 27 crew asked Daskalos what he wanted.
He said slicks, immediately. Nearly everyone else bolted on rain tires.
The track dried. Daskalos surged to the front while his rivals scrambled back to pit lane for dry rubber. That gap never fully closed.
Ellis, subbing for Lorcan Hanafin who was busy at Le Mans, inherited the car with solid track position and managed tires through brutal Georgia heat. He sat behind the sister No. 34 JMF car of Mikael Grenier and Michai Stephens for most of the final hour, content to let the one-two hold. But when outside pressure mounted and fuel numbers got tight, Ellis made his move with under 20 minutes left, passed Grenier cleanly, and nursed the car home.
The No. 34 wasn’t as fortunate. A late power-loss issue sent Grenier sliding to sixth overall, though he still held on for second in the Pro class. That result was enough to extend the No. 34’s championship lead to eight points heading into a two-month summer break.
Grenier was honest about it afterward: “The win was possible, but we will regroup.”
For Mercedes-AMG and JMF Motorsports, Sunday’s result carries a particular distinction. They are now the first manufacturer and team to win overall races with two different cars in the new three-hour GTWCA format. The No. 34 took the inaugural win at Sonoma in March, and the No. 27 took this one.
Four races into a new era, JMF owns half the victories.
Daskalos, a veteran customer racing driver in his second GTWCA season, had never won overall or in Pro-Am before Sunday. The breakthrough had been building since a third-place Pro-Am finish at Sebring last month. His family, seven members including his mother Soula and father Pete, watched from the paddock.
Not every Mercedes-AMG runner had such luck. The No. 9 TR3 Racing entry of Brayton Williams and Daniel Morad was right in the fight until a minimum driver time miscalculation forced extra pit stops, killing their shot and dropping them to tenth overall. It was the kind of procedural error that stings precisely because the pace was there.
In GT4 action, the No. 39 Dome Motorsport Mercedes-AMG GT4 of Marc Miller and Allen Patten grabbed another Pro-Am podium on Saturday. Local squad Off Leash Motorsports showed genuine speed in just their second Pirelli GT4 weekend before penalties and contact erased what should have been a strong result.
The series now goes dark until Road America at the end of August, the first of three events to close out 2026. JMF heads into that stretch with momentum in both its entries and a manufacturer behind it that appears to be hitting its stride in American GT racing.
Ellis, for his part, summed it up with the casual understatement of a man who had slept four hours in 48: “It was a perfect weekend.”
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