The emotion level rose when Labonte was giving his farewell speech, particularly when it came to talking about his team owner.

"I think the only time I almost got choked was when I was giving my little speech up there and I was talking about Rick," he noted, "I was going to mention his family and I couldn't do it. He's been a great guy and a great owner.

"It's been a great ride and a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed this series all these years, but I guess everything comes to an end sometime. I've been doing this for a long time, and I've been very fortunate in my career to have been with some really good teams, and to have been able to win a couple of championships and some races and have a lot of good runs."

The veteran admitted that the realisation of just how long he had been in the sport came a couple of seasons back, when he found himself surrounded by the next generation of driver.

"A few years ago, I was sitting in the drivers' meeting and I was looking around and half of these drivers were younger than my kids!" he smiled, "I thought 'you know what, I don't know how much longer I'm going to do this'.

"I decided a couple of years ago to run the limited schedule and then wind up the career here, and here we are. The past two years went pretty fast, but I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to be doing, but it's where we are."

Asked the obvious question about whether this was really the last time we'd see Terry Labonte in a race car, only the thought of a Seniors tour raised a smile.

"I don't know," he admitted, "I'm pretty sure you won't see me behind the wheel of a car anymore. I feel like I've done this for a long time, and I've been very fortunate over the years. I'm going to be 50 years old in a couple of weeks and there comes a point when, if you're any kind of athlete in any kind of sport, it's going to be time to retire some day. I think it's here for me.

"I'm just very fortunate to be in motorsports and I've been able to have a career that lasted as long as it did. You look at some of the other sports and guys can't compete near that long. The other thing that's neat about it is I was able to go out when I wanted to go out and not because of some circumstances that were out of my control.

And as for that Seniors tour.....

"I hope they'd run senior cars too," he laughed, "I don't know. It would be great as long as it's on short tracks, half-mile tracks, or something like that, but I think that'd be a pretty expensive proposition for somebody to come up with. I'd probably do pretty good in it though because I'd be one of the youngest oldest guys there!"