Team Dream

Yesterday, October 2nd, the Trading Card Database added the team functionality to the Racing category! Yes! This was something I'd been wanting to do for a while, but I wasn't quite organized enough to officially ask for the feature yet. That's fine, I'll jump right in and start working on it.

I don't know if it is because Prizm included the team names and logos on the cards, which I believe is the first time ever, or my subtle hint dropping, or perhaps one of the other NASCAR collectors asked for it and I didn't see where. It's also possible Admin may have just done it on their own initiative. Either way, I'm thrilled.

Hendrick Motorsports will surely have the most cards by team. After all, the top three drivers with the most cards have all spent significant time at Hendrick- Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Gordon alone has more than 6000 cards and all but about 20 are from his time at HMS.

Jimmie Johnson is not far behind, with the 6th most cards, and most of his are with Hendrick as well, though there are some from his time with Herzog Motorsports in Busch before he moved to Hendrick. Even Dale Earnhardt (Sr.) has one card from his very brief time with Hendrick Motorsports. Not many people know that he drove a Hendrick car in Busch in 1982. In fact, he won the very first official Busch race in said car. Hendrick co-owned it with Robert Gee, a top engine builder...and also Dale's father-in-law, and Dale Jr. and Kelley's grandfather.

I suspect Joe Gibbs Racing will be second, although Roush would likely have been if they didn't become Roush Fenway in 2008.

The research will be some of the more obscure teams...in most cases I know who the owner is, but not necessarily what they called the team. Even some of the less obscure teams...for instance, when Bill Elliott formed his own team in 1995, it was originally Elliott-Hardy Motorsports. But sometime after that Hardy left and Elliott flew solo. Problem is, I'm not exactly sure WHEN that happened...and what it was called when Hardy left. I simply referred to it as "Bill Elliott's team" all the time. Therein lies the research ahead of me...especially as I just scanned a couple of cards of Elliott and his car from 1997 Maxx that I need to upload. I was literally in the process of scanning them while the team feature was being added.

Either way, I am really happy this feature was added. It will provide me with hours of work, true, and I'm not the only one working on it. But I am going to be making a big push to get the team info correct. I will not stop scanning and uploading while I work on it (I don't want to get burned out, naturally) but I will spend a lot of time working on it in the near future.
Also, it comes at a perfect time as I had pretty much uploaded everything I had prepped to do. I had been building a collection of scans so I would always have something I could work on, but after the problems with the remote hard drive crashing, I decided to upload everything I could. (There are some I can't find checklists for). With the Database's last update it is now faster than ever and I pretty much ran out of scans, getting to the point three days ago where I am basically uploading something as soon as I finish scanning/labeling it. It's still fun but I like having big batches to do.


The best trading card site on the internet just got even better - again!