A High-End One of One for the Daytona 500

Today is the day of the Daytona 500, the big event that kicks off the NASCAR season. I figured I'd better roll out a big card to mark the event, and I think I've got just the thing.

This relic card comes from the 2016 Panini National Treasures Racing set, the first real high-end racing product to come out of Panini's acquisition of the NASCAR license. It's got a nice swatch featuring the Alpinestars logo, but just above that you can see some fancy 'One of One' script running along Danica Patrick's arms. This is the Blue # 1 / 1 parallel of her Firesuit Materials insert card, and it's the only one out there.

It popped up on eBay a couple of months ago with a tempting Buy It Now price, but it was still a lot of money for one piece of cardboard. I probably would have paid the full price, but I sent an offer for about 80% of the asking price, and after a few stressful hours the seller accepted it. It was still a lot to pay for a card, but I felt like it was probably the best price I was going to get on a legitimate non-printing plate # 1 / 1 for my Danica Patrick collection. I do wish that it was more apparent at a glance that this is the only one, as it doesn't have a Superfractory sheen or anything to it, and the script gets lost a little in the picture, but I guess you can't have everything. I'm pretty thrilled to have something like this in my driver collection. Now all I need is a patch/auto booklet and I'll be set (mostly set, you're never really done adding to this sort of collection).

As far as the race goes, NASCAR instituted some scoring changes for this season, where every race is divided into multiple stages, and the top ten drivers for each stage get points for the season. They also get end-of-race points. There's more to it, but you need like a math degree or an app or something to keep track of it, because there are also two different kinds of points, playoff points and season points.

Danica finished each of the first two stages in the Daytona 500 as part of the Top 10 drivers, so she got 1 point (10th place) for Stage 1 and 6 points (5th place) for Stage 2. Then she was involved in one of the many wrecks on the day and had to leave the race. It's looking like her final race position will be 33rd place, good for another 4 points. So by my math, she'll finish the race with 11 points total. We'll see where that leaves her overall at the end of the day, but her final position in the standings will be better than 33rd, as she will get credit for running among the leaders for the first two-thirds of the race. It was disappointing to see her get wrecked out, because it looked like she might be able to grab a Top 10 or even a Top 5 finish today.

edit: She got 5 points for her finish in the qualifying race, plus her 11 points for the Daytona 500 stages and finish. That puts her at 16 points total so far on the season, good for 24th in the standings.