Rally de Portugal 1987

Overview

Twelve months after the tragedy-struck Portuguese World Championship Rally, the top teams and drivers returned to the country for the third round of the 1987 contest with mixed emotions. So much had changed. Drivers had changed factories. Factories had left the sport only for others to join in. It was always so, but the major change in the intervening period had been the cars themselves - pulled back more towards standard specification by stringent rule-changes - most as a direct result of Portugal 1986 and the later death of Henri Toivonen and his co-driver in the Tour de Corse. The cameras were rolling just the same though, and some top-class shots and sequences were extracted from the rally, which featured the major factories struggling to maintain progress against the stiff odds of suspension unequal to the very rough roads.