Saturday: not up quite as early today … over to the Corvette Corral by about 8:45 AM … the forecast calls for the possibility of heavy rain and/or thunderstorms around the end of the race … Mobil and Michelin both make interesting presentations at the corral … Michelin is bringing all-season tires to market for the C7 Grand Sport and C7 Z06 (previously only available for the Stingray) … credentials and wristbands are everything at the Rolex … we walk through the paddock as teams complete their final preparations … one of our friends surprises his wife with a birthday cake at the corral—she is appropriately stunned … the cake vanishes quickly … Corvette folks can eat … the open grid fan walk starts at 1:05 PM and draws thousands of spectators onto pit row and the beautifully manicured infield … Ivelis gets close to Jeff Gordon, Jordan Taylor, and Justin Bell as they talk near the #10 Cadillac DPi-V.R prototype … Gordon effortlessly draws a large crowd … Ivelis complements Justin on his checkered flag shoes … with about half an hour to go until the start, it starts to spit moisture … we walk up through one of the track crossover gates into the stands … the Coast Guard flyover helicopter gets quite close to the grandstands … one of the Porsche 911 GT3s hits a barrier on the warm-up lap and goes behind the wall—I cannot imagine what it is like to know your 24-hour race is already over before it has officially started

green flag! … amazingly, there are no crashes on the frenetic first lap … the Ford GTs are the class of the GTLM field—no one else is close … the #10 Cadillac keeps blowing tires … in the late afternoon, the #82 Ferrari 488 GT3 catches on fire in the pits … at around 6:00 PM we go to "Taste of the 24" charity event … we leave stuffed … it rains hard for about 10 minutes in the early evening … almost everybody dives for the pits to get rain tires—as soon as they do, it stops raining … Ivelis drives the 2012 back to the hotel at around 8:30 PM … even with all of the lights, there are parts of the road course that are fairly dark, especially around the International Horseshoe … you can distinctly hear cars banging into each other as they go around the horseshoe … I walk back to the stands and sit with a few of the folks that we met at Le Mans in 2016 … the traditional fireworks at 11:00 PM leave a fog of smoke over the track—do they warn rookie drivers? … I take a Lyft to the hotel around midnight