Danica Patrick National Treasures Quad Materials Gold - Food City 500

Today's Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway was postponed until tomorrow due to rain, but I am still going to post a NASCAR card today. This is one of those cards that pops up in your eBay feed, and you know you have to have it. It's just a sharp-looking card, and the price felt about right for what it was.

This is a Danica Patrick Quad Materials relic card from 2016 Panini National Treasures Racing. It's a Gold parallel, numbered # 01 / 10. But the reason it jumped out at me was all of the colorful relic swatches. There's some firesuit here, some sheet metal, and some tire. It's just a nice-looking piece of cardboard. I probably wound up overpaying a little for it, as prices have been driven down by the large amount of Panini product hitting the market, but I don't think I overpaid by enough to really worry about. I'll be interested to see how long it takes for Panini products to reflect Danica's change in sponsorship after things fell apart with Nature's Bakery.

Here is the back of the card, which features a description of Danica's 13th-place finish in the AAA 400 Drive for Autism last season. I don't know if the relic swatches on the front are related to that race, but I am guessing that Panini isn't bothering to match relics to card-back descriptions. It is nice to find a card-back with something more than just the usual blurb regarding authenticity, though. Even though you can find any of these stats, quotes, or descriptions online within a few seconds, I am not ready yet to give up on finding trivia and statistics on the backs of my cards. It is refreshing to me when a sports card has more than the bare minimum on the back.

It looks like qualifying for the this weekend's race was cancelled due to the weather, so drivers are starting in order of the points standings. Danica's season has been a little underwhelming so far, so she'll be starting in 29th place when the race kicks off. Hopefully she can improve on that positioning during the run.