Rookie Brayton Williams Grabs First GT3 Win as TR3 Racing Survives Road America Chaos
Brayton Williams and coach Daniel Morad turned a June penalty heartbreak into a 6.4-second Pro-Am victory in a race that eliminated nine of 23 starters.
Brayton Williams had never won a race at this level before Sunday. The first-year TR3 Racing driver and his coach and co-driver Daniel Morad took the No. 9 Mercedes-AMG GT3 to the Pro-Am class victory — and third place overall — in GT World Challenge America's three-hour race at Road America, beating the RS1 Porsche of Jan Heylen and Danny Dyszelski by 6.433 seconds.
Williams ran with the Pro-Am front-runners through the opening stint before handing over to Morad, who muscled past Heylen with just under 40 minutes to go and managed the gap to the checkered flag. According to Mercedes-AMG, it was TR3 Racing's first endurance-race victory and the team's third career GT World Challenge win.
The result reverses the story from June's round at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta, where the same pairing was in contention for the overall win until a miscalculation on minimum driver time forced extra pit stops and dropped the No. 9 to 10th. This time the execution held up: Morad credited the crew with getting through the entire race without a single pit stop mistake.
"The racing was pretty hectic in my stint. I was coming through the kink and following a competitor and I had a big snap. I thought that was our race right there, but I hung on to it and kept pushing," Williams said.
Simply finishing was half the job. Only 14 of the 23 starters made it to the end of a caution-filled race, won overall by the Turner Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 EVO of Justin Rothberg and Robby Foley. It was also Road America's first taste of the series' new format, introduced this season, which replaced the familiar two 90-minute sprints with a single three-hour race and a minimum of two pit stops.
The win completed a set for Mercedes-AMG, which says it is the first manufacturer this year to score Pro or Pro-Am victories with each of its full-season GT World Challenge entries. The No. 34 JMF Motorsports car of Michai Stephens and Mikael Grenier finished second overall and leaves Wisconsin with a three-point lead in the Pro standings, while the sister No. 27 of Jason Daskalos and Philip Ellis recovered from a race-weekend engine change — and just 20 minutes of practice — to take fifth in Pro-Am.
There was a Mercedes-AMG result in the GT4 ranks, too: Am-class duo Eddie Killeen and Laura Hayes drove the No. 37 Dome Motorsport Mercedes-AMG GT4 to a season-best second place in Saturday's rain-soaked Pirelli GT4 America sprint.
Two rounds remain on the 2026 calendar: Barber Motorsports Park on September 25–27 and the double-points Indianapolis 8 Hour finale in October. With just three points covering the top of the Pro championship, the title fight is set to run to the season's final stint.
