The winners finished first, fifth and 11th in the season-ending Hardee's 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Mark Martin won the race. Dale Earnhardt finished fifth and put the finishing touches to his fifth NASCAR Winston Cup championship. And Rick Rudd's 11th-place finish was good enough to make him the series runner-up - barely.Martin was in charge for 190 of the 328 laps on the 1.522-mile oval, including the last 48, beating second-place Ernie Irvan by 10.5 seconds.
Earnhardt, who now has won two straight championships and four in the last six years, only needed to take the green flag on Sunday to wrap up his latest championship and the $1.3 million that comes with it.
But the 40-year-old racer from North Carolina raced hard on Sunday, leading three times before fading back to fifth in the late going.
"I felt like today we were in good shape," he said. "We were a contender, but then the car got too tight. The last two sets of tires didn't do anything for us."
Rudd, who ran a steady and unspectacular race Sunday, got the benefit of a bad break for Davey Allison, who came in leading Rudd in their battle for second place in the season standings.
Allison led early in the race and appeared to have one of only a handful of cars that could stay with Martin. But an electrical problem sent him to the pits for a long stay that cost him seven laps and he wound up finishing 17th in the race and four points behind Rudd.