I got it working.
A little bit after my first post I found the topic "one vhost per file" where one of the users commented the following:
“I did some additional testing and it looks like certbot doesn’t like the fact that the tag is inside of httpd.conf - it would rather have it in a dedicated file.”
and this is exactly what was my problem. I took the vhost part out of my main httpd.conf and moved to a seperated files in /sites. Once done the automatic apache configuration and cert creation worked perfect.
thx.