“Clint earned the championship. He'll be a great champion. It's neat to see how excited his family is and how excited he is. I'm as happy as I can be for another guy to beat me, and I hope he enjoys it.

“One time I raced against him in Moberly, Missouri, and I beat him. It was awesome. That day felt real good. It doesn't make up for this day, but it felt good. Clint's a really good guy. It's so cool his mum and dad come to the races.

“The way he told me the story, he started racing out of the corner of his dad's tow truck shop. He's a great racer. That day in Moberly, if you would have told Clint and I we would be racing for the Nationwide Series Championship in 2008, I think that was 2001 or something, I would have laughed so hard. We were just a couple of dirt racers having some fun there.

“Now, no matter how tomorrow goes, the thing is this winter, I can go into this off-season knowing that we're going to be tough next year. We're going to be tough over here in the Nationwide Series and in the Cup Series. We've grown a lot and had a lot of fun.”

Though he insists he is taking things simply 'a year at a time', Edwards – who will compete in the Race of Champions for the United States at Wembley Stadium in London next month, alongside countryman Travis Pastrana – admitted it is 'a blast' to be able to dovetail both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup programmes throughout the season, and revealed that he 'plans on doing it for a while'.

That is news that has pleased team owner Roush, who acknowledged it had been 'a super year' – albeit conceding that he had one small regret…

“The race team has done a great job coming together,” the 66-year-old underlined. “Drew is going to be really good in this business, I think as good as any of the crew chiefs that are famous for their success. All of our sponsors have hung with us this year. It's been a great year.

“It's been a pleasure to be involved in the Nationwide Series and to be this close for a second year. If I look back, the only thing I wasn't able to do, as an owner, was to be able to race with Carl and Drew in the Nationwide series. That would be enough for me. It's been a great pleasure.”

“We had to do what they didn't do,” Blickensderfer summarised of the team's Homestead challenge. “Basically we wanted to put as much space between us and them as possible. The way it worked out, the #2 [Bowyer] pretty much stayed on our game plan and they were running good enough that they could stay within four or five car lengths from us most of the time, so it was tough to get off-sequence with them.

“At the end I had seen last night's race, took stuff from that and knew that the only way we were going to have a chance to win the championship, let alone the race, was [to] stay out. Hopefully Clint was far enough back and he would come and get tyred, but unfortunately it didn't happen.