Dale Jarrett Wins Brickyard 400

Dale Jarrett passed Ernie Irvan seven laps from the end of the 160-lap Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Saturday and held on to win the race and stir up NASCAR’s Winston Cup championship battle.

“He went a little high and a little hard into that corner,” Jarrett said of Irvan. “My car was a little better out front.”

Jarrett, who earlier this season won the Daytona 500 and the Coca-Cola 600, averaged 139.528 mph in the race that lasted 2 hours 52 minutes .476 seconds. His victory was worth more than $500,000 from a purse of $4.7 million.

Once he had taken the lead, Jarrett quickly moved out to a six-car-length margin over his Robert Yates Racing teammate. He appeared to have things well in hand when Robert Pressley’s car hit the wall on lap 159 and brought out the last of five cautions.

Terry Labonte finished third in a Chevrolet Monte Carlo and moved back into the series lead by 61 points over injured Dale Earnhardt, who watched most of the race from the pits.

Jeff Gordon, who came into the day leading, spent most of it watching his crew repair a crashed car.

Jarrett moved from fourth to third, trailing Labonte by 63 points, while Gordon slipped from first to fourth, 104 points behind the 1984 Winston Cup champion.

Kyle Petty lost control of his car on lap 38. Running second at the time, he appeared to simply lose control, like Gordon, and slapped the outside wall. He ricocheted into Sterling Marlin, barely missing Mark Martin, then drove almost head-on into the inside wall near the entrance to pit road.

Petty was taken to Methodist Hospital for precautionary X-rays and was later released with what track officials said were a bruised left leg and back.

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Bob Vandergriff Jr. and Richard Hartman qualified No. 1 for the first time in their careers, and Jim Yates led the quickest Pro Stock field in NHRA history in the Northwest Nationals at Kent, Wash.

Vandergriff covered a quarter-mile at Seattle International Raceway in a track-record 4.642 seconds at 299.40 mph in the Top Fuel division. Cory McClenathan set a track speed record of 309.38 and qualified sixth at 4.692.

Hartman remained No. 1 in Funny Car with his pass Friday of 5.039 at 294.02 in a Chevrolet Camaro. Yates took the top spot with a career-best pass of 6.995 at 196.76 in a Pontiac Firebird.

Tennis

Spain’s Francisco Clavet, seeded sixth, reached today’s title match of the $474,000 Grolsch Open at Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with a 6-3, 6-4 victory over Romania’s Adrian Voinea.

Clavet, winner of the event in 1990, will play Younes El Aynaoui of Morocco in the final. Aynaoui defeated Holland’s Dennis van Scheppingen, 6-3, 6-7 (7-5), 6-2, in the other semifinal.

Horse Racing

Continentalvictory become the first filly to win the Hambletonian in 13 years, holding off a late charge by favored Lindy Lane to win trotting’s most prestigious race, at East Rutherford, N.J.

Trained by Ron Gurfein and driven by Mike Lachance, Continentalvictory trotted the mile in a stakes-record 1:52 4/5, breaking the old Hambletonian mark of 1:53 2/5 set by American Winner in 1993.

Last year’s 2-year-old filly champion thus became the first filly to win the first two legs of the trotter’s Triple Crown. She is bidding to be the first Triple Crown winner since Super Bowl in 1972.

Continentalvictory, the first filly to win the Hambletonian since Duenna in 1983, won the Triple Crown’s first leg, the Yonkers Trot, on July 6. She will race the the final leg, the Kentucky Futurity at Lexington, on Oct. 4.

A judge in White Plains, N.Y. threw out grand larceny charges against harness race driver Herve Filion and four other men after ruling that the charges did not fit the crimes with which they were charged.

Westchester County Judge Kenneth Lange rejected the prosecution’s theory that grand larceny was involved because more than $200,000 in losing wagers were placed on races that were allegedly fixed.

The five men still face lesser charges of conspiracy and sports tampering. They had been accused of an elaborate scheme to fix races at Yonkers Raceway.