The 1987 season was open to FIA Group C Sports Prototypes, FIA Group C2 Sports Prototypes, and IMSA GTP cars. The ten-round calendar was the championship's last before a series of format revisions in the late 1980s reshaped the competition. A total of 239 drivers started in at least one round, again reflecting the multi-class and international scope of the series.
The season saw Jaguar mount a dominant challenge that ended years of Porsche supremacy. The Silk Cut Jaguar XJR-8 and XJR-9 were consistently the fastest cars across the season, and the manufacturer's eight race victories represented a comprehensive statement of intent ahead of the 1988 Le Mans campaign.
In order to be classified for points, a team was required to complete 90 percent of the race winner's distance. Drivers were required to complete at least 30 percent of their car's total race distance to qualify for points. Drivers who competed in more than one car during a race forfeited their points. Group C2 drivers received additional championship points for any outright top-ten finish.
Only the seven highest scores from each driver's season counted toward the final championship total, with any additional scores discarded. The same seven-result retention rule applied to both the Drivers and Teams championships.
Raul Boesel won the Drivers Championship, claiming the title in a Jaguar entered by Silk Cut Jaguar. His victory was the first by a non-Porsche driver in several seasons and represented the culmination of Jaguar's revival as a competitive force in top-level endurance racing. The Drivers Championship result was a direct function of Jaguar's overwhelming race-win tally: eight victories out of ten rounds gave Jaguar drivers a structural advantage in the points accumulation race.
Fermin Velez took the FIA Cup for Group C2 Drivers, which rewarded the leading driver in the smaller-displacement Group C2 category across the season.
Silk Cut Jaguar's Teams Championship win sealed a historic season for the British manufacturer, which had returned to top-level sportscar racing in the mid-1980s after a lengthy absence. The team's combination of reliability, outright pace, and numerical dominance in race victories produced a definitive championship result. Spice Engineering won the FIA Cup for Group C2 Teams, extending the British team's record in the Group C2 sub-championship.
The 1987 season ended the multi-year stranglehold Porsche had held on the World Sportscar Championship since the introduction of Group C regulations in 1982. Jaguar's eight wins out of ten rounds was a margin of dominance that had previously only been associated with Porsche's own campaigns. The season set the stage for Jaguar's overall victory at the 1988 24 Hours of Le Mans, which would follow directly from the competitive momentum built across 1987 and confirmed the championship's status as the proving ground for the world's top sports prototype manufacturers.