HOMESTEAD, Florida (AP) — As the laps wound down yesterday 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 team-mates 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 yesterday 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 long-time 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 play-off, 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 yesterday 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 burn-out 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."