NASCAR chairman Brian France denied that a former official complained to her supervisors about racial and sexual discrimination, claims she alleged led to her eventual firing.

Mauricia Grant filed a $225 million suit against NASCAR Tuesday, alleging racial discrimination, sexual harassment and retaliatory termination. Grant, who is black, worked as a technical inspector for NASCAR's second-tier Nationwide Series.

France said he detailed filing was the first NASCAR learned of her claims.

"The disappointing thing is she makes a lot of claims, none of them reported," France said. "The fact that it went on as she stated, for many months, but never bothered to tell anyone at management what was going on -- which is what our policy says -- is very disappointing.

"We would have liked, if those type things were in fact going on, we would have loved to have done an investigation and a review of such an allegation."

France said NASCAR will review Grant's claims, which included 23 specific incidents of alleged sexual harassment and 34 specific incidents of alleged racial and gender discrimination she says began when she was hired in January 2005 through her October 2007 firing.

NASCAR will not disclose why Grant was fired late in the 2007 season.

In her suit, she claims she was referred to as "Nappy Headed Mo" and "Queen Sheba," by co-workers, was often told she worked on "colored people time," and was frightened by one official who routinely made references to the Ku Klux Klan.

She denied France's claim that she never complained about her treatment, saying she followed the chain of command but stopped short of taking it to human resources when series director Joe Balash failed to address her concerns.

Peugeot will try to stop Audi's four-year winning streak at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in Paris this weekend. Audi, however, remains confident it can still go the distance in the world's most famous endurance race.

Peugeot dominated the first qualifying session for the race, with its three cars clocking the three best times ahead of the trio from Audi.

Stephane Sarrazin of France had the fastest lap of 3 minutes, 18.513 seconds on the nearly 8.5-mile circuit -- beating the lap record by 7.8 seconds. Audi's fastest lap was set by Allan McNish of Britain, who went around in 3:24.105 for the fourth-best time.