It rains in France, everyone knows that. At the 24 Hours of Le Mans, which is deep in France, the only question is when it will rain. If it starts to downpour as your car is sitting on the grid on slicks, waiting to be waved off on the opening parade lap, that?s very bad news for you. With the clock ticking down to the 3:00 p.m. start of the 84th running of this 24-hour classic, a slow drizzle steadily devolved into a pissing annoyance, which devolved into a full biblical deluge. And Le Mans luck, that highly fickle finger of fate, began to pick winners and losers.

First to suffer was the No. 67 Ford GT, which the crew suddenly pulled off the grid just minutes before the parade lap, and wheeled ignominiously on its dolly into the garage. Gearbox problems, already. The transmission is a known weak point of the mid-engine megabuck GT (heck, every team has had gearbox problems over the years) but Ford engineers felt they had the problem licked. Well, that was the brave face they?ve been showing to the public, anyway. As the rest of the teams scrambled their tire carts, swapping their intermediate wet tires for full wets, the Ford crew poked and prodded, eventually deciding it was the shifting mechanism that had gone out of whack. Then, an 84-year-old race that has never started under yellow started under yellow, waved off the line by actor Brad Pitt, and running the first 52 minutes behind the safety car. As the skies cleared and the corner workers used brooms and lea...