DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Two-time IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) champion Russell Ward has added another honor to his 2025 season.
At Mercedes-AMG’s annual year-end event, Champions United in Affalterbach this weekend, Ward was ranked the second-highest Pro driver in Mercedes-AMG GT3 competition globally.
More than 400 drivers and around 100 teams participate in the 2024/2025 competition period of the Mercedes-AMG Customer Racing Championship, which ran from October 29, 2024 to October 20, 2025 this year – thus covering the full 2025 WeatherTech Championship season. Points are awarded by type of Mercedes-AMG car (GT3, GT2 or GT4) and by driver categorization, with any driver rated Silver or higher eligible for the Pro category.
Ward finished second to double ADAC GT4 Champion Jay Mo Härtling, who won both driver and junior championships.
In Ward’s 2025 season, he won three races with Philip Ellis (Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, TireRack.com Monterey SportsCar Championship, Michelin GT Challenge) and a Motul Pole Award at Road America en route to his second straight title.
“It definitely wasn’t as easy as last year,” Ward reflected during the WeatherTech Night of Champions event in October. “Without competition, there’s no show.
“It was an awesome year. We started off in Daytona with a bang (recovering multiple laps after a throttle assembly issue). I mean, when you’re seven laps down with a failure then we’re able to get back to the lead for some of the race, that kind of fighting spirit that helped throughout the whole year and really brought us the championship.”
Ward, Ellis, Indy Dontje and Lucas Auer tested the No. 57 Mercedes-AMG GT3 at the IMSA-sanctioned November test earlier this month.