1987 F1 Season

The best car of 1987 was a Honda-powered Williams, and it belonged to two drivers who could not stand each other. Williams won the constructors' championship with 137 points, almost double McLaren in second on 76, and nine of the sixteen races. The question of the year was not which team would win, but which of its two cars.

On raw speed it was no contest. Nigel Mansell took eight poles and six wins; Nelson Piquet four poles and three wins. But Piquet finished races, and in an era when only each driver's eleven best results counted, that was enough: he scored 76 points, 73 of them counted, and Mansell stayed on 61.

The title was settled in the driest way imaginable. In practice at Suzuka, the second to last race, Mansell crashed and did not race again that year: our data records him as withdrawn before the start in Japan and absent in Australia. Piquet won his third championship without having to fight for it, and Gerhard Berger won the last two races of the season for Ferrari.