“Obviously I’m pretty proud of all my people,” Hamilton said.  “I’ve raced for a long time and driven for a lot of other people.  I know that if you don’t have good stuff, or strong people to make this happen, it doesn’t happen very easily.  This championship is about our team, sponsors and Dodge, without them we wouldn’t be here.  I was standing on stage, with my son, grandchild and all of my guys.  It’s almost like you wrote a script for a movie, and all of a sudden it lands that way.  So, that’s my soft spot with this deal.”

Hamilton drove a very conservative race for 134 laps.  The motto of the day for the team was being safe rather than sorry, and the latter they weren’t.  Hamilton never led a lap during the event, but did what he could to stay out of trouble and brought the Dodge to the championship stage in one piece.

“We pretty much knew everything that was going on during the race,” Hamilton said.  “The engineers actually wrote a computer program that they could just punch a button if Dennis led a lap, which he did, where I’d have to finish at. When he made up a position or five positions they could type it in and let me know where everybody was and what we had to do.”

Halfway through the race, Hamilton dropped back to 29th position trying to preserve a tire he thought was going down.  Then on lap 89 the sixth caution came out just in time for the Square D Racing Team to make its final pit stop of 2004.  They quickly changed four Goodyear Wranglers and added Sunoco fuel to Hamilton’s Dodge and sent him back on the 1.5-mile speedway.  When the crew members pulled the used tires back across the wall, they discovered that Hamilton did have a right-front tire that was shredded on the inside. 

“I saw Kasey Kahne coming up to lap me, but I had to take it easy because I had right-front going down,” Hamilton said.  “We just didn’t want to advertise it, because a lot of people would try to take advantage of it.  Kasey, being a team Dodge truck, backed off a little bit, so I didn’t get lapped.  The caution helped us because the tire was only two pounds low, but it had a cut place where I’d hit something on the racetrack.”

After the final pit stop Hamilton did what he needed to do in the final laps to clinch the championship title.  “Right there at the end a bunch of people were one lap down and it got wild on the restarts,” Hamilton said.  “So, I just fell to the tail end of the longest line because Setzer was five or six positions ahead of me.  We had a good Dodge though; I just didn’t show my hand at all.  Near the end of the race I ran the fastest lap all day and my crew chief about fell off his seat.  I wanted my team to know that I was really good out there, but was using my head to stay out of trouble.  It paid off in the end.”

Kasey Kahne won the Ford 200 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.  Ted Musgrave, David Starr, David Reutimann and Matt Crafton followed in the top five.