Press Pass FanFare is a hit-centric product that offers one autograph or relic per pack. It is sold at retail stores like Target and Wal-Mart with one blaster-sized box containing a single pack of five cards. At the usual $19.99 price point I am able to avoid this stuff, but when Target sticks a couple of boxes of the stuff into the Clearance bin I have a hard time resisting the chance that I might pull a nice Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Danica Patrick piece. This is something that never happens, though, as I will generally pull something from a Nationwide driver that no one's ever heard of before and then kick myself for being suckered in yet again.
First out of this particular pack were two base cards and one die-cut blue foil parallel, which might be retail-exclusive. The card-fronts feature lots of shiny embossed foil and pictures of drivers in sunglasses leaning casually on things. The backs of the cards feature the cars themselves, as well as a little snippet about the driver. There are no statistics or anything like that. It's kind of like most of the high-end baseball stuff, where the base cards don't contain information because the company knows the base cards are just a delivery vehicle for the pack hit.
There are non-hit inserts in the set, though, as this Matt Kenseth Power Rankings card shows. It is made of a different kind of shiny cardboard, and features the driver and car on the front of the card and a season summary on the back.
And now, the hit. This is an autograph / relic card of Elliott Sadler, who is a long-time racer but isn't really one of the bigger names in NASCAR. It could be much, much worse, but this probably isn't a card I would pay $13.98 + tax for normally. At least I didn't buy the pack at full retail. It is numbered # 67 / 99.
Sadler is currently 2nd in the Nationwide Series, which is kind of like AAA in baseball. Sadler has spent plenty of time in the Sprint Cup Series, running in 435 races over 15 years with 3 wins and 69 top ten finishes. He has spent the last few years mostly focused on Nationwide racing, though, finishing 2nd overall in 2011 and 2012, and fourth in the series in 2013.
I'm not a race collector, but I always cheer for Matt Kenseth. He grew up in/around my hometown in Wisconsin and was even the track champion there as a teenager in the early 1990s in the late model division on a 1/4-mile oval high-banked paved track. I still think of him as "Matt the Brat" as a result!
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