2016 Panini Torque (retail)

Panini's second NASCAR effort came out recently, the NASCAR-only brand Torque. Featuring a 100 card set, the brand is available in hobby boxes and as 8-card retail blasters, which guarantee a hit of some sort. That is what I opened and will be covered here.

 The cards are very dark and most feature staged photos from the annual photo shoot held in Daytona every February. (the same source for most of the photos in Prizm, also). Kurt Busch made it to the round of 8 in the Championship this year.

John Wes Townley is a rare person to see on cards- this is only the second card of him in my collection. He's one of the least popular drivers in all of NASCAR...both among fans and other drivers. Although he has gotten better recently, he has a tendency of crashing...often. At one point he was even fired by the team his family footed the bill for due to poor performance. His father owns Zaxby's.

Regan Smith is the most recent driver from the state of New York to win a Cup race, which he did in 2011. Tommy Baldwin Racing, which he drives for, may have gone out of buisness at the conclusion of 2016, it's unclear yet if the team will return one of it's two cars or none.

This is an insert, even if it looks more like a subset. The color photo is from 2005, the black and white photo is from 1998. Labonte was a regular in Cup from 1978 through 2004, then ran a partial schedule from 2005 through 2014.  He won the 1984 and 1996 Cup Championships.

I was surprised to pull this serially numbered insert parallel from a retail pack...Johnson won his record tying 7th Championship this year.

My promised hit. This is the blue parallel of the Dual Relic insert, and although Panini can't be bothered to tell us what kind of material we are getting, it's a piece of sheet metal and firesuit. Cassill is a card collector himself, and even had a TV segment about his card collection several years ago. Like myself, 1991 Maxx is his favorite set as well.

 One thing I really like about Panini's offerings is that they give us cards of cars...although only a handful, it's better than what Press Pass did, which was usually no car shots at all.

Terry Labonte's base card- the final card in the set- looks very similar to his Nicknames insert, probably because the photo was taken from the exact same photo session.

Card backs are pretty much worthless. Black and white version of the same photo, standard blurb and no stats. Disappointing, especially considering how much you pay for a hobby box of these things. ($150)

Even the insert backs are pretty much the same.

Since the cards are so overwhelmingly dark gray to black, most of them came out of the pack with some minor chipping along the edges, especially the bottom edge. These cards are not going to age well due to the overall darkness of the cards. Even so, I'm still happy to have added the set to my collection, and I would not mind getting more.