Bernie Collins is not long home from a grand prix when she makes a quick pit stop in Dublin. The Sky Sports Formula One analyst is brighter-eyed than most people would be if they missed a night’s sleep while returning to Warwick, England, from the Saudi city of Jeddah via a stopover in Doha, only to repack two days later.
But after more than a decade of frequent-flying to often far-flung places, the Co Fermanagh woman’s travel recovery tactics have been well-honed.
“It’s fine. You get methods of coping with it,” says the F1 performance engineer turned top race strategist turned esteemed TV pundit.
After a photo-shoot for The Irish Times in the Dylan Hotel, she changes into her own clothes for our interview, which takes place as her star rises in tandem with the profile of the sport itself.
“Everywhere, I think, the support is going up, the viewership is growing, the female audience is expanding massively,” she says over freshly poured tea.
“Now people know pretty much every team on the grid, and you see a lot more people on the street wearing F1 merchandise. I’ve been fortunate in the timing of my move, for sure.”
F1’s new cachet beyond its traditional fan base – credited to the soapy appeal of Netflix documentary series Drive to Survive – could be reinforced by the June release of F1, a Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt as a veteran driver and Kerry Condon as a race director. Condon has said she “got a lot of help” from Collins, who served as an adviser on the project.
“Given that I have only just started in TV, film has blown my mind,” says Collins.
She wasn’t brought on board because she was a female strategist, but because she would have an eye for “all the little background details”, like what the garage layout should be, and what the screens should look like.
“Then I had some time with Kerry and some of the other actors on the pit wall to explain what their emotion would be at certain points in the story.”
This foray into film is another serendipitous gig for Collins, who resigned from her role as head of race strategy for F1 team Aston Martin in January 2022 with no destination in mind.
She just knew she was exhausted from a full season of going from circuit to circuit, city to city, year after year, with a “pretty relentless schedule” of 22 races in 2021 – including a “triple-header”, or three consecutive race weekends – prompting the gear-change.
“We did Mexico, Brazil and Qatar, three big time-zone shifts, three big long-haul flights, and for engineers there’s no downtime at all. I just got to Qatar totally broken, jet-lagged, not sleeping, struggling to stay awake. I thought I was going to make some big mistakes if I didn’t pull myself together.”
That Christmas, with F1 between seasons, she decided the situation was “not recoverable”. Still, in that demob-happy way, during her six-month notice period the agony of the schedule eased.
I think in Ireland it is very easy to have the notion that there’s obviously someone better for that job and not necessarily put yourself forward for it
— Bernie Collins
“People say lovely things when you’re leaving. It was a real confidence boost.”
Among these lovely things was an on-mic thank you from then Aston Martin driver Sebastian Vettel, who told her after her last race in Budapest that she was a “great person”, while the team hailed her as a “true inspiration to women in motorsport”.
The lovely things haven‘t dried up now she has switched lanes to broadcasting. “Bernie Collins is the bomb” is the title of one admiring Reddit thread marking her arrival to the Sky team. And when she announced on social media that she would be attending 10 out of a possible 24 races this year – an “ideal number”, she says – the replies had one common theme. They wished she was doing all of them.
To understand why Collins commands so much respect, let’s reverse back to her F1 origin story. You don’t have to be a motorsport aficionado – you don’t even need to have caught a second of Drive to Survive – to find it brilliantly refreshing.
Growing up in Maguiresbridge, Co Fermanagh, Collins (christened Bernadette) remembers F1 being on television without paying much attention to it. At Mount Lourdes Grammar School in Enniskillen, her strongest subjects were maths and physics. Unsure what she wanted to do with her life, she opted to study engineering at Queen‘s University Belfast, thinking this would keep her options open.
She was enjoying its mix of academia and “building stuff”, but it didn’t occur to her that motorsport, or anything automotive-related, could be her future path until along came an annual engineering competition called Formula Student. This involved designing and building a single-seater race car and racing it against other university teams at Silverstone, home of the British Grand Prix.
“I remember my first time at Silverstone, I was standing on the start/finish straight with this little car that we had built, thinking it was a really cool thing to have done, and that it would be nice to work in that world,” she says.
But her career in the sport almost stalled before it even began. When F1 team McLaren sought applicants from Queen‘s for its graduate scheme, Collins didn’t apply at first. Her lecturer had to encourage her a second time.
“I think in Ireland it is very easy to have the notion that there’s obviously someone better for that job and not necessarily put yourself forward for it. I just thought hundreds of people are going to apply for that.”
When she and another Queen‘s student got deep into the recruitment process, they were invited over to McLaren‘s F1 base in its Surrey technology centre – a vast, ultra-modern complex.
“To me it was just like space age. It was just so futuristic. You go there and you think, ‘wow, unbelievable’. I remember thinking ‘well, at least I’ve seen the factory’,” she says.
In the end, she was recruited and stayed with McLaren for six years, initially moving from suspension design to gearbox design. On race weekends, she supported its F1 team from mission control, then helped out at the “cold, wet, windy tracks” where its GT3 sports cars raced.
Being trackside isn’t for everyone, she says. “It is quite a hard environment. It’s long hours and late nights, and it’s tiring.”
But by giving up her free weekends, she wound up being offered the chance to become the performance engineer for F1 driver Jensen Button for two races in 2013. It was a breakthrough. Now she would be trackside at F1.
She did those races in India and Abu Dhabi, then the whole of the 2014 season, bringing her to places and cultures and climates she had never been. The trick was finding time to embrace it all amid “a lot of late nights trying to make sure everything was as it needed to be with the car”.
In 2015, she left McLaren for the more modestly resourced Force India team, which later rebranded to Racing Point, then to Aston Martin, and soon became its head of race strategy. Now she was charged with getting its drivers the best spots on the track.
“Qualifying was always quite intense. Then on Saturday night, you came up with a plan for how the race might go. But the main part was the race. You’re trying to react to what life throws at you.”
How strategists respond to weather conditions, safety car interventions, accidents or whatever else happens in the race is what separates good from bad ones, she says.
The work doesn’t end at the finish line. “The week after you do all the analysis on what you should have done. What would have happened if I stopped one lap earlier? What would happen if I started on a different tyre?”
She liked this part, too, despite the pain of easy hindsight and the “very public” nature of her role.
“You feel like you’re the last line of defence, so if you make a mistake and it loses the team position or points, you’ve got to get off the pit wall and walk through the garage with people who have worked all week to get the car built, but they’ve not had the best result because you’ve made the wrong decision.”
Drivers aren‘t always reticent either.
“They can have their opinion on the radio, and that’s the bit everyone hears. Sometimes the discussion in the office is very different when they see the data. You have to sort of bite your tongue a little bit,” she says.
On the pit wall, she was no stranger to adrenalin.
“We put heart monitors on everyone at one point, and you could see where the pit stops were from people’s heart rates. You could see how many stops we did, and which ones went right, and which ones went wrong.”
It was a midfield team, meaning it was “never meant to win a race”. Any position on the podium “felt like a fantastic result”. But in the penultimate race of the 2020 season, its driver Sergio Pérez triumphed at the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain, giving Collins both an unexpected race victory and the title for her 2024 book, How to Win a Grand Prix, now out in paperback.
Collins talks about this undoubted career highlight in the same methodical, measured fashion that is so valued by F1 viewers now and must have served her well on the pit wall.
“There are so many things that could have been different that day, but actually the decisions we made were pretty straightforward, because we had done a lot of prep,” she says.
Other successes were less visible, while a podium finish could disguise some bad decisions. She remembers being congratulated at the airport after the team podiumed in a wet German race – wet races being the most stressful – but thinking “we have had a shocker”.
People love hearing an Irish voice, and people who have been watching for a long time have got in touch to say they’ve learned something new
— Bernie Collins
Being on an F1 team is highs and lows, the lows being “pretty rubbish”, the highs being very high indeed, but though she misses that team atmosphere, she has no regrets about leaving.
“I loved being on the pit wall, but I wouldn’t give it up for the work-life balance I have now.”
After her final race, she did video explainers for F1TV. Then, when Sky asked her to do a podcast and she sent over some graphs in advance, the broadcaster realised it didn’t have anyone quite as deep into the data and invited her to attend Jeddah the following year.
“I wasn’t really thinking about all of the people watching at home, so the first one was not daunting. Then I started getting messages from friends going, ‘Why are you on commentary?’”
The response to her engineer’s grasp of F1’s complexities has been “really strong”, especially from Ireland.
“People love hearing an Irish voice, and people who have been watching for a long time have got in touch to say they’ve learned something new.”
This support has helped her adjust, she says.
“Before I had a real influence on the results. What happened in the race was directly affected by what I did that weekend. Now I don’t affect the results in any way, but I maybe have more influence on people’s enjoyment of the race. It’s taken me a wee while to get used to the idea that it’s still as important a role.”
Television has tested her because she’s “probably much more of an introvert”, she adds.
This probable introvert is now in demand off-screen too. As an exemplar of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers, and with all the bonus thrills of the pit wall and live TV on her CV, she is often asked to speak at corporate events. It might be about using data in races, pit-stop teamwork or female recruitment into industries dominated by men.
She wasn’t the only woman in the F1 pit wall, but there’s “definitely” space for more, and the way to do it, she believes, is to boost the numbers who study engineering.
“Not every girl is going to want to be an engineer, I get it. But I’d love to encourage it a bit more,” she says.
“Within F1, I don’t think there’s any feeling that it’s not a woman’s role, but outside when you speak to people in the pub or whatever, there will be someone saying that’s an unusual role for a girl.”
Although she thinks the image of engineering has improved, people sometimes still suggest it’s “a dirty role, like a mechanic’s role”, she says.
“I’ve never worn an overall in my life.”
[ Formula One still some way off seeing a female driver in a Grand PrixOpens in new window ]
With viewership of F1 estimated by researchers Nielsen to be 40 per cent female – “crazy for the sport that it is” – the push is also on for the next F1 female driver. The last woman to enter a race did so 33 years ago.
The F1 Academy, a female-only racing series, is “starting to show young girls that girls can go racing”, says Collins, though “the big thing” is to increase the number of seven- to nine-year-old girls who go karting. “That’s probably more about getting their parents to think that karting is possible for them at that age.”
She’s encouraged by the advent of more female-targeting sponsors into the sport. “Imagine the kudos for a company that sponsors the next female F1 driver? That would be a really big thing.”
As for the current F1 season, led at the time we speak by Oscar Piastri ahead of McLaren team-mate Lando Norris, she thinks Piastri has it. “Because he’s just so cool, calm and collected. He’s really got his head together.”
[ Max Verstappen wins Emilia-Romagna GP to close gap on title rivalsOpens in new window ]
Beyond F1 and public speaking, her life at home in Warwick, in the hinterland of Silverstone, has also been busy, and not only because she fosters guide dogs and volunteers as a first-aider for St John Ambulance.
Soon it will be time to pop champagne away from the podium: During a Christmas skiing holiday in Val-d’Isère, she got engaged to her partner Ryan McGarva, a former F1 pit crew member and mechanic who quit to go freelance around the same time she did.
“At some point I need to devote some time to planning a wedding,” says Collins.
Wherever life and F1 take her, she can rely on her family in Fermanagh to keep her grounded.
“They see stuff in the paper, things like that, and they find it a bit bizarre, I think. They’ll take a photo and send it to me on the WhatsApp group and say ‘Why are you being an idiot?’ There was one recently where they had my age wrong. I’m 39, but they put me down as, like, 34. My cousin sent me a picture, going, ‘Who are you trying to kid?’ So you still get the same amount of abuse.”
