MOTOR SPORTS ROUNDUP : On Further Review, Unser is Disqualified in Portland

Three hours after overpowering the field at the Budweiser-G.I. Joe’s 200 in Portland and taking over the lead in the PPG IndyCar Series points race, Al Unser Jr. was disqualified Sunday.

Three hours after finishing nearly half a lap behind Unser, Jimmy Vasser had his first Indy-car victory.

Kirk Russell, vice president of competition for IndyCar, said Unser’s Penske-Mercedes was found in a post-race inspection to have less than the required two inches of ground clearance.

The car had been bottoming out throughout the race, sending up puffs of white smoke from the compressed board skid pads attached to the underbody. One of the pads flew off on the 90th lap of the 102-lap race on the 1.95-mile, nine-turn road course.

Russell said that missing piece did not play a part in the decision, although he said, “It may have come off because it was taking such a pounding.”

Roger Penske, the owner of Marlboro Team Penske, which fields cars for Unser and Emerson Fittipaldi, filed a protest and issued a statement that said, in part, that the car passed repeated inspections throughout the weekend.

For Unser, it’s just another part of a tough season.

“I think it’s a real shame that this happened to Team Penske, and it just seems to be that’s the way the year has been going,” he said.

The year has included a failure to qualify a Penske car in the Indianapolis 500.

“The team worked really hard,” he said. “Nothing was wrong with what happened to the car today. It was something that IndyCar saw as a rules violation. We’re moving on to Elkhart Lake [Wis., in two weeks] and looking forward to racing there.”

This is the first such disqualification of an apparent winner in the Indy-car series since 1983, when Tom Sneva was penalized for a similar transgression after winning at Milwaukee. In that case, spectators had been leaning against the car in victory lane before it was inspected, but the ruling stood.

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Terry Labonte survived a race-long duel with Chad Little to win the Lysol 200 NASCAR Busch Grand National stock car race at Watkins Glen International in Watkins Glen, N.Y.