Greatest Races #10: A Mansell rampage and an iconic move grab a famous win – 1987 British Grand Prix

To mark F1's 75th anniversary celebrations, F1.com is counting down the sport's 25 greatest races with a new feature every week. While you may not agree with the order, we hope you enjoy the stories of these epic races that have helped make this sport what it is today. You can read the introduction to the series and see the list of races here.

Coming in at No. 10 on our list is the 1987 British Grand Prix, with an intra-team fight at Williams that had plenty of extra spice.

What makes for a great race? One might as well ask what makes for a fantastic meal. There isn’t a checklist – but the 1987 British Grand Prix certainly had all the right ingredients: reversal of fortune; competing strategies; a truly mesmeric recovery drive from a home favourite, willed on by a gargantuan and partisan crowd; and, of course, the wider context of team mates with more needle than a tailor’s dummy duelling for a championship.

A glorious summer of racing

Williams’ FW11B was the class of the field in 1987 and, by the time the championship got to Silverstone, for Round 7 of 16, the team were already pulling away from the pack. Things weren’t so obvious in the Drivers’ Championship, with neither Nelson Piquet nor Nigel Mansell able to string the results together, resulting in them lying third and fourth, behind McLaren’s Alain Prost and Lotus’ championship leader, Ayrton Senna.

The week before the British Grand Prix, however, Williams had scored a 1-2, with Mansell in France leading home his double-World Champion Brazilian team mate. The crews were wearing the shortest of shorts, the Pet Shop Boys’ It’s a Sin was at #1 in the UK charts, and the sun was shining at Silverstone.

The 1980s was the decade for tight, tense team mate battles. Williams started the decade with Alan Jones and Carlos Reutemann; Ferrari famously and tragically had Didier Pironi and Gilles Villeneuve; Prost and Senna at McLaren would achieve a certain notoriety one year on from our chosen Greatest Race year – but it was Prost and Lauda before who delivered the closest championship finish in F1 history. And then there was Piquet and Mansell.

Tension brewing

Ann Bradshaw was Williams’ press officer in 1987. Her five decades in the sport have seen her work with many champions, including Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, Damon Hill, Sebastian Vettel, and of course, Mansell and Piquet.

“They didn’t like each other. They just didn’t. Piquet is a joker. He likes winding people up, and Nigel didn’t appreciate it. Every so often, Nelson would lob in another hand grenade, and he wasn’t the sort to apologise later, because he didn’t care what people thought. They were both set in their ways, you couldn’t talk to either of them about it. It’s just the way it was.”

Fans of any sport, but particularly F1, tend to enjoy the frisson of a grudge match, and there wasn’t any doubt who the crowd at Silverstone were going to be behind. Not every driver, despite words to the contrary, enjoys their home Grand Prix: there’s a weight of expectation and a significantly increased workload – but Mansell brimmed with enthusiasm for his home race.

He’d won the European Grand Prix at Brands Hatch in 1985 and the 1986 British Grand Prix at the same venue – but until 1987, his record at Silverstone was average.

“They all want to win Monaco, and they all want to win their home Grand Prix,” says Bradshaw. “The fans at Silverstone loved Nigel, and I think perhaps him more than any of the other British drivers before or after. I think he was the fan favourite because he didn’t do anything the easy way. That tended to get everyone in the grandstands on his side.”

Problems for Mansell

Case in point of Mansell not making it easy was being edged out for pole by Piquet by seven hundredths of a second. If he was going to make it back-to-back British Grand Prix victories, he had to get past his team mate. The start didn’t help, when he was passed by Prost at the first turn. He soon took that position back, but it would, of course, get worse when he began to feel a vibration.

Dickie Stanford spent several decades as Williams’ team manager – but back in 1987, he was the gearbox mechanic on Mansell’s car.

“I remember it as being one of those weekends that was very nearly perfect. The cars in ’86 and ’87 were relatively simple, but we’d usually be working in the garage until 2am. At Silverstone that year, we were done by 6pm, looking at each other wondering what to do next. It helped that we were so close to the factory, but even the Sunday morning warm-up went perfectly.

“Often after those, we would be changing things on the car right up until the race start, but that year Nigel did a couple of laps in the spare car, and then the rest of the warm-up in his race car, and everything worked smoothly. The only thing that went wrong was not taking pole position – and of course, the problem he had with the vibration.”

Prost rolled the dice on Lap 29 by coming in for fresh tyres, but Piquet and Mansell, never separated by more than a couple of seconds, weren’t expecting to make a pit stop – but Mansell was having trouble. The vibration – later traced to a dislodged wheel weight – got progressively worse, to the extent he was struggling to maintain the pace, and so, on Lap 35, pitted for new tyres. Well clear of Senna, running third, he retained P2, but emerged with a 29-second deficit, and with 29 laps to make up the ground...

A tough task

“To be quite honest, we felt, or at least I felt, we weren’t going to catch Piquet,” says Stanford. “Nelson had too big a lead… and then Nigel breaks the lap record, then breaks it again, and again, and again.”

Tweaks around the Woodcote and what became Luffield corners meant a lap record was always going to be set during the Grand Prix, but Mansell’s assault was mesmeric. He set a new benchmark on his first flying lap out of the pits.

Piquet raised his own pace and briefly took the record back, but Mansell on the fresh rubber was not to be halted, smashing the record lap after lap as he homed in on the gearbox of his team mate.

He was driving, in his own words, at ’10 tenths’, roared on by his home crowd, brushing aside backmarkers – which with the Williams at Qualifying pace, was everyone. The records show they lapped the entire field – but such was the pace on display, Ayrton Senna was the only car one lap down; everyone else they lapped twice.

It was a chase where anything could happen. With everything turned up to 11, Mansell might shake the car to pieces, or run out of fuel. When he caught Piquet he might get by – but equally there was every chance both cars would end up in the gravel. “There was no love lost between them, and we knew that they raced hard – and quite honestly, [we thought] they would take each other off,” recalls Stanford.

Williams let them fight

The majority of teams, then as much as now, would tell the drivers to knock it off, or at the very least by mindful of their responsibilities. It wasn’t the Williams way. Co-owners Frank Williams and Patrick Head didn’t so much tolerate an internecine scrap as actively encourage it.

“They liked drivers who were out there giving each other a hard time,” says Bradshaw. “They’d get criticised for it sometimes, but they were racers and they loved racers.”

“Later on, we had the same with Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher,” adds Stanford. “Frank felt it was good to have that sort of rivalry, and the only time he stepped on anything was if it was likely to affect the garage, because the team always came first. I think that’s why Williams have more Constructors’ than Drivers’ Championships.”

The pass, when it came, was suitably heroic, the most Mansell-like Mansell moment, being an exceptionally brave, fully committed, flat-out lunge up the inside at Stowe. Those of a romantic inclination tend to remember it as happening on the final lap, and the narrative practically demands it be so – but in reality, Mansell took the lead on Lap 63 of the 65 and had two laps to soak-up the adulation.

The Williams crew didn’t have monitors or radios in 1987, just information imparted by the chief mechanic, and what they could glean from the circuit commentary. “It was the roar of the crowd that told us Mansell was through,” says Stanford. “That and David Brown [Mansell’s race engineer] on the pit wall giving a fist pump.”

The coda, and perhaps the defining image of the ’87 British Grand Prix, was Mansell running out of fuel on the in-lap and the car being engulfed in a very good-natured track invasion. Mansell was then inelegantly hustled back to the paddock in a Ford Transit van, while his crew fretted about exactly how much of the car they were going to get back…

“The chief mechanic was worried about fans grabbing a souvenir,” says Stanford. “Even in those days, we’d get as close to the weight limit as we could, and there were so many people around the car, he was worried about losing wing mirrors and the steering wheel – but the marshals were pretty quick and we were okay.”

The crowd, suitably thrilled, went home happy. Williams, with lots of family members in attendance, celebrated with a Silverstone barbeque. They were 21 points ahead of McLaren in the Constructors’ Championship, Mansell had pulled level with Piquet in the race for the Drivers’ title, and both were just one point behind Senna. Like the Silverstone crowd, the momentum was firmly with Nige… but Piquet would bounce back.