No Contest, Earnhardt Wins : Motor racing: He is the NASCAR season champion after finishing third at Atlanta. Morgan Shepherd wins race.

When Mark Martin failed to mount a challenge for the Winston Cup stock car championship Sunday in the season-ending Atlanta Journal 500, Dale Earnhardt contented himself with motoring his Chevrolet Lumina to a third-place finish to clinch the $1 million season championship bonus.

Martin, who had led much of the season until the next-to-last race at Phoenix, finished sixth, one lap behind Morgan Shepherd, the race winner in Bud Moore’s Ford Thunderbird. It was Shepherd’s first victory since 1986.

“We’ve got nothing to be embarrassed about,” Martin said. “We ran as hard as we could all day, all year in fact, and we got beat by the best. Maybe we’ll be the best next year. I guarantee you we’ll be better, but right now it’s Dale’s party. We probably weren’t good enough to win anyway. We’re just happy we pushed them as hard as we did.”

Shepherd’s victory pulled Ford into a tie with Chevrolet for the manufacturers’ championship with 194 points, but Chevy won the most races, 13 to 11, which was the tie-breaker.

“After the way the year started in Daytona (where Earnhardt lost to Derrike Cope on the last turn of the last lap when a cut tire went flat), it’s been a tough year,” Earnhardt said. “We won nine races and four poles, more than anyone else, but we kept having things go wrong and got behind in the points. We’re happy now, though, and it’s more satisfying because we had to race right to the finish to get it.

“We had a close call today when that car (Jim Bown’s Pontiac) spun in front of me and I couldn’t see for the dust, but after that we had no trouble. When we found out we weren’t going to catch Morgan or (Geoff) Bodine, we decided to settle down and take third place and be sure we had the championship.”

A crowd estimated at 75,000, attracted by the possibility of a million-dollar shootout between Earnhardt and Martin, jammed the newly renamed Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Earnhardt, who also picked up five bonus points for leading the race, finished 26 points--4,430 to 4,404--ahead of Martin, who will collect $330,000 as the season runner-up. Earnhardt’s take Sunday, including season-long contingencies for winning the championship, will amount to about $1,326,000.

This pushes the year’s take for the 38-year-old second-generation driver from Doolie, N.C., to an unofficial $3,202,830, which includes $170,000 for winning the International Race of Champions.

It is Earnhardt’s fourth Winston Cup championship. Only Richard Petty, with seven, has won more.

“I don’t know if we’ll make seven. It’s getting tougher and tougher to win with guys like Jack Roush (Martin’s car owner) in the game today, but even if I got to seven or even eight, Richard would still be the King,” Earnhardt said.

Geoff Bodine finished second, 2.52 seconds behind Shepherd, and Dale Jarrett fourth, both in Fords. They were the only other drivers on the same lap with Shepherd, who won $62,150.

“The way I look at it, this was a $400,000 win for us,” said Moore, 65, who ran the late Joe Weatherly’s cars when he won the championship in 1962 and 1963. “It got us back on the Winner’s Circle program (of financial incentives for racing next year), and that’s what it’s worth for a season.”

Shepherd averaged 140.911 m.p.h. for the 328-lap race, which included 34 laps run under caution flag conditions. There were 19 lead changes among nine drivers.

“When I came around the saw that checkered flag, I had tears in my eyes,” said Shepherd, 49, who started 20th. “I’m glad we saved our best tires for the end. We needed them to finish as strong as we did.”