HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- As the laps wound down Sunday at
Homestead-Miami Speedway, Matt Kenseth put the finishing touches on
as dominating a performance as took place in NASCAR's Nextel Cup
series all season.
Hardly anyone noticed.
Almost all the focus was on title contenders Jimmie Johnson and
Jeff Gordon, the Hendrick Motorsports teammates and friends who
made the championship their own private duel in the waning weeks of
the season.
The TV cameras and most of the 65,000 folks in the grandstands
seemed to watch every move by the two points leaders Sunday as
Johnson wrapped up his second straight championship with an
uneventful seventh-place finish. Four-time champion Gordon finished
fourth and came up 77 points short of another title.
Those that weren't paying attention to Kenseth missed an
incredible run by the 2003 series champion, who won his last race
with longtime crew chief Robbie Reiser on his pit box. Reiser is
moving up to general manager of Roush Fenway Racing.
After struggling in the first few races of the 10-race Chase for
the championship and falling to the bottom of the 12-man playoff,
Kenseth finished with five consecutive top-five finishes and wound
up fourth in the season points.
Despite leading 214 of the 267 laps on the 1.5-mile oval -- a
track where he had never led a lap before -- the most attention that
Kenseth got Sunday was when he and Johnson did side-by-side
burnouts in front of the main grandstand, the gray smoke billowing
out of both cars.
Kenseth then backed away and stopped in the middle of the track,
fittingly enveloped momentarily by the smoke as Johnson, the star
of the moment, drove slowly past to the accolades of the crowd.
"I couldn't see him, so I thought I was on fire and I couldn't
breathe," Kenseth said, grinning and shaking his head.
"I honestly thought about that, you know. After we took the
checkered flag, I was like, `I should just go to Victory Lane
because Jimmie won the championship and it's not about the race
winner. It's the Ford championship weekend and it's about the
champion.' I didn't really want to go out there and share the stage
or take away attention from him.
"Then I starting thinking. He's won 10 races this year and he's
burned up 12 sets of tires in (victory celebrations) the last four
weeks, and he won the championship last year, so I figured it
wasn't a big deal for me to go out there and do a burnout and then
take off."
The normally placid -- some say boring -- Kenseth couldn't hide
his excitement after his 16th career victory and first since the
second race of this season, in February at California Speedway.
"It was a pretty dominating ride," Kenseth said, grinning.
"It was fun."
It looked as if Kenseth was going to cruise to the victory as he
built a lead of more than 1.6 seconds over Martin Truex Jr. late in
the 267-lap race. But the seventh and final caution flag of the day
came out on lap 254 when two-time champion Tony Stewart hit the
wall.
That bunched up the field for a restart with nine laps remaining
and 2004 champion Kurt Busch immediately took second place and went
after the leader. But Kenseth was just too strong, pulling steadily
away and winning by about a dozen car-lengths.
"If some people would have just got better and we couldn't get
our car better and they beat us in the middle of the race, that's
the way it's going to be," Kenseth said. "But if I'd of got beat
in those last 10 or 12 laps, I'd be probably semi-suicidal.
"We've lost a lot of close ones. We had a good car and Jimmie
snuck up there and beat us at (last month) Texas," he hesitated,
"and Phoenix," another hesitation, "and Atlanta. Anyway, you get
the picture. There have been some times when we've won some close
ones through the years, too. But we lost a lot of close ones this
year and, when that happens on the track, me as a driver feels bad.
I feel like I let those guys down. So this definitely feels good."
It also was a fulfilling day for Reiser, a heated rival of
Kenseth in their short track days in their native Wisconsin before
hiring him as his driver and moving together to Cup as Kenseth's
crew chief in 1999.
"Man, did we come on at the end of the season," Reiser said.
"I'm not a real emotional guy. That's what my dad taught me when I
was racing. But that's what I am, a racer.
"When this is all said and done, I didn't get fired, we're all
friends and I get to go back to work tomorrow doing the same job,
just from a five-team standpoint instead of one."