A ring with involution * is called *-clean if each of its elements is the sum of a unit and a projection. It is obvious that *-clean rings are clean. Vas asked whether there exists a clean ring with involution that is not *-clean. In this paper, we investigate when a group ring RG is *-clean, where * is the classical involution on RG. We obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for RG to be *-clean, where R is a commutative local ring and G is one of the groups C3,C4, S3 and Q8. As a consequence, we provide many examples of group rings which are clean but not *-clean.