Stolz finished third in the second of the two races at the Dutch venue on Sunday, holding off two-time champion Wittmann by just 0.249s in a tense battle for the final spot on the podium.
Stolz was running behind Wittmann in the first stint but jumped his countryman by pitting a lap later, with his HRT crew servicing his Mercedes-AMG GT3 in 7.9s compared to the 9.3s it took for the Project 1 team to change all four tyres on Wittmann’s BMW.
The 27-year-old then had to fend off his more experienced rival, with Wittmann keeping the pressure up on the Mercedes driver until the chequered flag.
Speaking after his first podium result since last year’s Red Bull Ring event, Stolz said he had to rely on Mercedes’ superior traction out of the corners in order to keep the faster BMW of Wittmann at bay on Zandvoort’s straights.
“In the early stages when he had a lot of traction then it's always hard to fight the BMW because feeling-wise they are 100km/h quicker,” he said.
“But as soon as he lost a little bit of the tyre, I saw that I was better on traction and I could always place myself well.
“Then it was quite easy to defend because in the last laps I saw if I do no mistakes then he will stay behind.”
Wittmann, on his part, also felt Stolz had an advantage exiting low-speed corners, which meant he was unable to pull off a move and score his first podium of the season.
"He had extremely strong traction out of the slow corners and accordingly always had a gap for the straights,” he told broadcaster ran.de. That's why there was no way past him.
"We had phases in the race when I was faster and caught up with him, then he was faster again. It was a constant change. We had a pretty similar pace.
"My hope was that maybe toward the end of the race his tires would go down. But in the end, there was nothing we could do."
Stolz endured a tough start to the season at Oschersleben along with the rest of the Mercedes contingent, ending up 25th and 23rd in the two qualifying sessions before retiring from both races.
Asked if he felt relieved to score a podium with a new chassis after his Oschersleben struggles, Stolz said: “Yeah, definitely, good day at the beach.
“We saw already from Friday on that we are much better than in Oschersleben because we basically had a new car because we had a broken chassis in Oschersleben.
“So it's great to come back like this. We saw already on Saturday we made some good steps in the right direction and I feel on Sunday we maximised some stuff and it just feels relieved as you said to be back on the podium."
Additional reporting by Heiko Stritzke
