Ryan Blaney, a 23-year-old stock car driver, had just finished a Mexican lunch a few weeks ago when he was stopped by someone who identified himself as a fan. The fan, wearing a David Pearson T-shirt, reached in his coat and pulled out a die-cast model of Blaney’s No. 21 racecar.

Blaney autographed the car, as he would for a fan at a racetrack, but he was not even close to the track. In fact, he was standing on a New York sidewalk. The fan had found out that Blaney would be in the city to promote Nascar and staked him out for an autograph.

“That’s the first time anything like that has ever happened,” Blaney said. “I have a pretty decent fan base, but nothing like that.”

Like Dale Earnhardt Jr., who seems to lure fans anywhere he goes, Blaney drives in the top-level Nascar series and is the son of a racecar driver. But the similarities between the two, for now, pretty much end there. Blaney took a different route to the top of his sport.