Common sight

After a pointless season at Minardi, Andrea de Cesaris switched to Brabham-BMW for the 1987 season. With the team owned by Bernie Ecclestone, he was able to achieve better results, even though he usually failed to match teammate Riccardo Patrese’s pace and race craft.

Actually, he scored one significant result in this 1987 season, when he finished a fine third, at the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, a track where he usually performed well and proved his speed, behind winner Alain Prost and Stefan Johansson.

For the rest of the season, we saw the more erratic side of the Italian’s racing style, as on the picture above at the 1987 Portuguese Grand Prix held, at the Autodromo do Estoril.

It must be said that reliability was far from perfect, to say the least, at BMW during the 1987, and de Cesaris (picture below) and Patrese more often than not suffered engine failures that prevented them to score more points.