More than 30 years in, I finally know...

 how many cards I have of each NASCAR team! You'd think, being my favorite sport, I would know everything about my collections by this point, but that wasn't the case. When I decided to expand my Excel chart to include teams, most of the NASCAR cards had already been entered, while I was able to add that info to the NBA and NHL listings as I typed them in, and what was already done I knocked out in just a couple of hours.

Since then, I have been slowly working on filling in the missing NASCAR team info, which I think I started to do back in 2017. I don't know when exactly, but that was the "break even" point where I had the teams all entered properly. 

However, NASCAR teams are not as cut and dried as stick and ball sports teams. ANYONE can start a NASCAR team and some of them can be pretty obscure. I had to do some deep diving into the sport's roots to figure out some of them, but I am not complaining- I LOVE this stuff more than anything else. Whereas for example the NBA has 31 teams in the largest season, NASCAR has roughly 125 across all divisions, although not all getting cards. and the team names can change and change drastically from year to year. 

For example, this is one team's history:

• AK Racing 1986-1993, when Alan Kulwicki was killed in a plane crash
• Geoff Bodine Racing 1994-97
• Mattei Motorsports 1998-mid 2000
• Ultra Motorsports Mid-2000 to 2002. Ultra was also it's own Truck team before that before buying out Mattei, continued after as it's own Truck team after 02
• Robby Gordon Motorsports 2003-12

And then you have the teams that merged, which is just a huge mess most of the time. 

For example, after 2008 Petty Enterprises, Yates Racing and Gillette-Evernham Motorsports merged to form Richard Petty Motorsports. In and of themselves Petty Enterprises absorbed pe2, Yates Racing began as Ranier-Lundy Racing before becoming Robert Yates Racing before renaming as Yates Racing when Robert retired. Gillette-Evernham Motorsports began as Elliott-Hardy Motorsports before becoming Bill Elliott Racing, then was majority sold to the Gillette family and also took over the #10 from MBV Motorsports. 

Then you have teams that had multiple cars that merged and split, although that's fairly rare. Let me discuss Premium Motorsports. Formed in 2015 by combining Jay Robinson Racing and Identity Ventures Motorsports, it later absorbed Phil Parsons Racing, XXXtreme Motorsports, 1 of the 2 Tommy Baldwin Racing teams, and 1 of the 2 Michael Waltrip Racing teams. The other Waltrip car and Michael Waltrip Racing closed, but Tommy Baldwin kept his other team, meaning that it both merged and kept going. 

Confusing? Yeah, a little. Why does that matter? Keep reading!

But wait, there's more! Because most NASCAR cards don't list the team name on the card, and some of these merges happened in the middle of a season, you have to look at each photo, and have a decent knowledge of what sponsor goes to which team- or know where to look it up. Racing-Reference and Wikipedia were the main sources I used but not exclusively. 

And there's yet more! Because NASCAR allows the drivers to race in any division, you can't just know that all cards in one set for that driver belong to the same team. Although I don't think it actually happened in a card set, it is not impossible for a driver to appear on cards for three different teams in the same set. Since it's taken me literally years to get this all typed up I just can't remember. It likely would have been in the early days of the truck series, as most lower divisions don't get cards. 

With all that said, here's the screencap of the leaderboard:

And a closeup of the top 10:

You can see from this closeup why the mergers make a difference. Jack Roush's team holds the 2nd and 10th spot (as well as a lower spot that debuted last year). So I had to make the Actual Top 10

I used Excel to tabulate the totals of each team (LOVE that autosum feature!) with the teams that have changed names mixed in with the teams that have kept the same name their entire duration. 

I chose to combine Trackhouse Racing with the Ganassi team, considering it bought it, and kept one of the two teams going, even though it formed as it's own team a year previously. I did NOT count the Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing years with DEI, however, as it was a Ganassi operation with the Earnhardt name only. They are counted in the Ganassi listing. The argument could be made that Ginn Racing and MB2 Motorsports should be added to the DEI stats because they absorbed that team (Bobby Ginn bought out MB2, it's the same team) and I may revisit that some day. Wood Brothers Racing, the oldest team in the sport, also has a handful of cards from their combined Wood Brothers / JTG Racing entry, but it's under 10 cards and that was more like a JTG entry than a Wood Brothers entry. The JTG entry would also include ST Motorsports, and could be argued to include the Alliance Race Team as well. 

Maybe by my mentioning this you see why this took me so long to put together!

Not that I'm complaining. Like I've said...I love this stuff so much. I hope I can keep it going going forward, and remember to update it on the 1st of each month when I do my other updating, because if I forget...even for one month...it will all be invalid and I'd have to start over again, which would be pretty soul crushing and I don't think I would do it. Hopefully by putting this into words, on proverbial paper, it will help cement it in my mind. 

One thing about this that makes me sad...with this project's completion, everything is all done on Excel now. I began typing my collection into Excel back in 2000, and now, finally...I've completed everything I can think to do. I still have to maintain new additions, sure, but all the creation is done. I enjoy messing around on Excel too much so I'll have to think of something else to do in the future.