Three races ago, Winward Racing sat nearly 300 points behind the GTD championship leaders. On Sunday at VIRginia International Raceway, Russell Ward and Philip Ellis climbed out of the No. 57 Mercedes-AMG GT3 as the new points leaders after their third consecutive victory.
That 300-point deficit is now a 36-point cushion with two races left. The math alone tells you how violently this championship has swung.
Ellis made the decisive pass in the closing minutes of Sunday’s two-hour-and-40-minute race, and it wasn’t clean. The driver he was trying to get around shoved the No. 57 off course. Ellis recovered, completed the pass a few corners later, and the offending car was hit with a drive-through penalty by IMSA officials.
The kind of call that tends to define championships.
“It is just nice to see the IMSA Officials stand up for what we were told in the drivers’ briefing,” Ward said afterward. “If you don’t leave racing room, if you push somebody off, you’re going to get a penalty.”
Ellis was more measured about the contact. I don’t think it was intentional by any means. He was just late on the brakes, and we were all struggling with tire degradation. It was a super-hot race.”
The win was the team’s fourth in eight races this season. They opened 2026 with a victory at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, then watched four straight races of misfortune bury them in the standings. Since July, they’ve been untouchable.
Wins at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, Road America, and now VIR have rewritten the title picture entirely.
Ward started the groundwork Saturday by qualifying third and banking 30 points, pulling the championship gap down to 14 before Sunday’s green flag even dropped. He ran his 50-minute opening stint among the leaders, even leading a lap before handing off to Ellis.
Ellis took the car through two pit stops and worked his way forward. He admitted the pass for the lead wasn’t a certainty. “If he didn’t have a GTD Pro car in front of him holding him up a bit, I’m still not sure how it would have turned out,” Ellis said.
Mercedes-AMG now leads the GTD manufacturer championship by 20 points, 2,634 to 2,614. VIR has become something of a fortress for the brand. Sunday marked the fifth career GTD victory for the Mercedes-AMG GT3 at the circuit, and the car has won four of the last five Michelin GT Challenge races since 2022.
Winward Racing entered the season as two-time defending GTD champions. The mid-season slump looked like it might end that reign. Instead, the summer run has put them right back where they started in January: at the front.
Ward knows the margins are razor thin. “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. There is still a lot of fight left.”
The next round is the Battle on the Bricks at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, September 18 through 20. The finale follows at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta in October. Two races, 36 points of breathing room, and a pack of rivals who just watched a near-300-point lead evaporate in eight weeks.
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