Pack of the Day 168: A Blaster Box of 2017 Panini Torque

I always get suckered in by new blaster boxes of Panini's racing card products. I just can't help it. The promise of a relic or autograph in each box gets me every time. I can't remember ever getting a hit card of a driver I actually collect from these boxes, but there's always the chance that the next box I open will be the one that gives me a Danica Patrick or Dale Earnhardt Jr. hit card.

So in spite of the odds being against me, I had to pick up a blaster of 2017 Panini Torque when I saw it sitting on the shelf at my local Walmart store. This is a hit-driven product, so there aren't many cards in a box. The front of the box promises 8 cards per box, but the foil pack inside says there are 10 cards in a pack. There wound up being 10 cards in the pack, so I guess boxes have 10 cards.

Panini doesn't list pack odds on their products, so instead you get a huge list of the cards available in the set. It seems like an awful lot. There are a million inserts and each of those inserts has a million parallels.

The base cards look pretty nice. There's a little bit of silver foil to go along with a mostly silver and black color scheme. The card backs look like that Rusty Wallace card up in the upper right corner. The Greg Biffle card in the lower right is a Gold parallel.

I got a pretty neat insert in this box. It's a Visions of Greatness card of Jimmie Johnson. This is the Blue parallel of the card, and there is lots of blue foil and blue coloring on the acetate background to denote that. All of the blue goes well with Johnson's firesuit. The card has two layers; one is cardboard and features the border with the driver's silhouette cut out of it, and the other is acetate with the flag pattern printed on it. This one is numbered # 04 / 99.

Well, it finally happened. I pulled a hit card of Danica Patrick from a retail blaster box. I guess it's really only half of a hit card of Danica Patrick, as she shares this one with Kurt Busch. The card comes from the Pairings Materials insert set, and features a bit of tire from Kurt Busch's car and a piece of sheet metal from Danica Patrick's car. The sheet metal looks a little green on this monitor, but in the hand it appears to be Nature's Bakery blue. You can see that Panini has made the switch from showing Patrick in her Nature's Bakery uniform. I think in the last couple of products she's been featured in her TaxAct or Aspen Dental firesuits. This is the base version of the card, numbered # 027 / 199.

I was pretty happy with this blaster box. I got a cool hit, a nice die-cut acetate insert card, and some good-looking base cards.