2014 Press Pass Danica Patrick Cyan Parallel

I was going to save the only remaining Danica Patrick scan in my folder for when the racing season started, but then I saw this Tweet from Patrick pop up in my feed and felt like I ought to share it here.

It feels so good to just be me. 🦄 according to @stenhousejr! 😆😝 pic.twitter.com/hK7GvmOPe0

— Danica Patrick (@DanicaPatrick) December 26, 2015

I like sports stars who can have some fun, and I think dressing up as a unicorn qualifies as having fun. That leaves me a little conflicted about Tom Brady. I don't much like Tom Brady, but have you seen the Halloween costumes he wears? Or that video from this Thanksgiving where he dressed up in a turkey costume and jumped out of a pile of leaves to scare his kids? I have to at least give him props for that, even if I am jealous that my quarterbacks and teams don't have the championship rings that he does. On to the card!

I picked up a couple of these Cyan parallels from 2014 Press Pass from an eBay seller who posted them with a reasonable Buy It Now price. The price was reasonable enough that I dropped everything I was doing and bought them on the spot. Reasonably-priced Danica cards are getting harder to find these days because Press Pass lost the NASCAR license when they folded and no one has stepped up to make new NASCAR trading cards. That means the supply out there is all there is, and the buying pool is competing for a dwindling supply of cards. There are still deals to be had, though, and I have picked up a few cards over the last couple of months. This parallel card is numbered # 27 / 35 and comes from the In the Hot Seat subset.

The back of the card matches the base card design, with a bit of flavor text talking about how Danica has to keep racing until the race is over. It seems like every racing set has a subset or insert like this, where various racing cliches are rehashed in relation to different racers. Obviously it's a way to get another 10 cards of your sport's stars in the checklist for collectors to chase. I am hoping that Danica continues to improve in 2016 and finally makes a jump to being a consistent Top 20 or Top 15 racer. She's got some new sponsors, too, so I am looking forward to seeing what her cars look like for the new season.

Tomorrow it is back to the grindstone for me, as I have just about reached the end of my 5-day break from work. I have another week or so in my current job, and then I move around the corner of the hallway into my new position. One big perk is that I'll be moving from the land of cubicles into my own office. It's more a function of where in the building each department is seated than a real reflection of status, but I will enjoy having four walls that go all the way to the ceiling.

2014 Press Pass Danica Patrick Cyan Parallel

With Press Pass closing up shop and the NASCAR license sitting in limbo currently there haven't been any new NASCAR cards printed for a while. There's older stuff available, but as the supply dwindles a lot of it is overpriced and/or stuff I've already seen a thousand times. I still pick up a card here and there, though, when something catches my eye at the right price. That's how I got this Cyan parallel of Danica Patrick from the 2014 Press Pass set. It's relatively low-numbered, being serially-numbered # 04 / 35.

I actually caught the tail-end of last week's CampingWorld.com 500 at Talladega. I was pulling for Dale Earnhardt Jr. to get the race won, but they couldn't get a clean restart there at the finish and he was eliminated from the Chase. Tough luck, but he handled it well in the post-race interviews and came off as a class act which is more than you can say for a lot of drivers.

Danica Patrick finished in 27th place. She was running a bit higher than that for most of the portion that I watched, but it looked like she got hung up in all the back-of-the-pack contact that was going on and lost a lot of ground at the end. Her finishes lately haven't been very good. I think she still pulls in a lot of viewers but I wonder how long she'll be able to hang around if she doesn't come out in 2016 and post some better numbers? Hopefully she'll get things figured out a bit more and make a jump to an average finish inside the top 20. I 'need' to get a couple of her 2015 die-cast soon, probably one in the regular paint scheme and one in her pink paint scheme. She's switching to a new primary sponsor next year, so there will be new cars to collect then. Hopefully there will be new trading cards then, too.