For the Callaway Competition partnership of Daniel Keilwitz and Diego Alessi, the fifth race weekend of the ADAC GT Masters at the Red Bull Ring in Austria was a massive step forward. After three weekends with mediocre returns, the Corvette duo carried off that most rare of achievements in the ADAC GT Masters, taking maximum points from the Saturday and the Sunday race. With one fell swoop, the 2012 championship runners-up were back in the running. Within the space of 24 hours, the Corvette duo had pushed up from ninth in the drivers' standings to second, and with six races remaining, they find themselves only one point behind current leaders Maximilian Buhk and Maximilian Götz in the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.

Keilwitz and Alessi arrived in Austria with a determination to succeed: "We saw last year that Red Bull Ring is a track that suits us, when we missed out on the win shortly before the end of the race with an engine failure," says Keilwitz. "So this year, we knew in advance that we would look strong at the Red Bull Ring. Porsche, who were our closest competitors in Austria last year, have a different aerodynamic setup this time round, which means that they're no longer quite so quick on the straights. Our lap times are now almost exclusively down to engine performance. Consequently, we knew that we had to get the maximum in Austria if we were to have any chance of staying in the title race."

After winning the season opener in Oschersleben the Corvette pair struggled at Spa-Francorchamps and at the Sachsenring. Things were starting to improve for Keilwitz and Alessi at the Nürburgring, even if they were unable to translate their solid performance into two good results. "We tested a lot in the summer and worked hard on the chassis of the Corvette together with Yokohama and our technology partner Bilstein," says Keilwitz, who now has six ADAC GT Masters winner's trophies in his cabinet. "We learnt a lot about the suspension. By the time the Nürburgring came round, we had already made a clear step forward, but over the race distance, we were still having problems with the tyre performance. However, that wasn't the case at the Red Bull Ring where the tyres held up right to the end of the race."

Keilwitz has mixed feelings about the sixth of the eight race weekends coming up at the Lausitzring, despite the fact the 24-year-old notched up his first ADAC GT Masters pole position in 2011. "We're using the sprint track at the Lausitzring this year. That's not so good for us, because we haven't got the long back straight where we've always been able to make up time in the past. That's followed by the Slovakia Ring. I don't know the track yet, and I suspect that Audi and BMW will be very quick there. I don't think that we will be able to take over from Mercedes at the top of the table at the Lausitzring. But I hope that we'll still be in the title chase by the time the final race weekend at Hockenheim comes round."