Another NASCAR Season Ends: 2014 Press Pass Total Memorabilia Danica Patrick Quad Relic

I took a day off from blogging yesterday. It was my birthday, but that didn't really keep me from blogging. I got a big lot of M.U.S.C.L.E. figures in the mail and it took me a couple of hours to get them cleaned up. For the most part they weren't too dirty, but I like to give them a quick bath in some Simple Green and give them a scrub with a toothbrush. That also allows me to check for missing / broken parts and other damage that might get overlooked. Tonight I will probably sort them into the collection, marking off my checklist and setting aside any doubles for distribution to my kids.

I was able to watch this week's NASCAR race, the Ford Ecoboost 400, which ended with Kyle Busch as the winner of the race and the overall season champion. My kids were happy to see the M&M's car on the TV so much. The other cars they liked were the McDonald's car and the Target car, but the M&M's vehicle is definitely their top choice in any race. I was pulling for Jeff Gordon to win it all in his last race, but he wasn't running well enough to catch the leaders and finished in 6th place after spending most of the race in the 10th-12th spots. Some of the other drivers I follow, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Josh Wise, had altercations with cars and walls and fell to the bottom of the pack, although both were still running when the race ended. Josh Wise's accident at least served to get some screen time for him and his sponsors, as the cars at the back of the pack don't often get on the screen at all during a broadcast.

Danica Patrick, the subject of this post, started in 35th and ran a lot of the race in the mid-teens before falling back through the field and finishing in her usual mid-twenties finish at 24th. That's not a bad finish, really, but I wonder if she'll ever move into the next tier of drivers with an average finish somewhere better than 20th place? The card in this post is a pretty nifty one, although it didn't scan all that well due to the fact that it is rolling in holofoil. It comes from the 2014 Press Pass Total Memorabilia set and features four relic swatches, all of them multi-colored. Clockwise from the upper left are a firesuit piece, a bit of sheet metal, a swatch of shirt, and a fragment from a glove. This is the Melting parallel and it is numbered # 15 / 25. The card popped up on my feed as a Buy It Now for about $10 less than I would expect the bidding to reach on something like this, so I hit the button and made it mine.

And that marks the end of the NASCAR season. I've still got one or two NASCAR cards to post about. I may save them for the start of the 2016 season or I may get impatient and post them sooner. I'm nowhere near a hardcore fan, but I do like to follow a few drivers and watch a handful of races during the year.