Bowyer also had another reason to celebrate his success, he related, having been 'killed' by Edwards when the pair of them – unbeknown to each other – had competed against one another much earlier on in their respective careers in Missouri. This second encounter, though, the 29-year-old acknowledged, had been considerably more nerve-wracking – especially through the final stint.

“The hardest thing is you knew it was coming,” he affirmed. “Every time we get into a deal where we're going to win a race or we have a good car, that always happens. We always have to go through the adversity for some reason – that last scare, before glory, before the end, whether it's good or bad.

“It's never easy, it seems, for us in the Nationwide car, but you know, that's what championships are made out of. I had a 56-point lead and still had trouble with it! The whole race I was three-wide, behind, knew I had to catch up.

“If you look at the race tonight, hell, I was nervous. I was like, 'we're not that good, how am I going to get up there?' We work together, we work hard, and Dan makes good decisions, and by the end of the night we're where we need to be. I think that we complement each other well, and I appreciate all of his hard work.

“Carl has been doing a good job of putting the heat on. You knew he was going to. You knew he was going for it in Carl Edwards' style, but you knew that you had to stick to your guns, stick to the basics, stick to what got us to this point. That's consistency, racing smart – and that paid off.

“It's paid off in every championship I've ever won. It's consistency, it isn't the races won. I mean, absolutely we wanted to win more races, but you'll give up a battle or two to win the war, and I feel like we earned the war. You go out there and do the best you can and race as hard as you can, and if that's not good enough, that's not good enough. You know, that's what got us to this point. We made some mistakes, but they made more mistakes.

“It was funny, I saw him (Edwards) on the steps leaving here, and he shared a story which we both thought was funny. We raced at the same race in Moberly, Missouri. It was my first asphalt race, I went over there with a guy named Scott Traylor who let me have an opportunity. He had an awesome car – I mean, this thing was beautiful, top-notch.

“Show up, and here comes this ragged-out, turd of a race car that was way louder than everything else and for whatever reason had different tyres than everybody else, and he killed us that day. And I'm like, who in the hell is that guy? It was Carl Edwards.

“So we had that moment down there, and I told him, 'That's payback for Moberly'. That was our first race together. We race a lot. He did a better job of wrecking my cars this year than I did, but we had a lot of fun and still, it comes down to enjoying each other, and Carl is a hell of a race car driver. There's no way of getting around it.

“You know, I'm damn proud to be able to beat a race car driver like that and a team and an organisation like he's got behind him. It says a lot about ours' and the people that surround me.