Sky F1's Bernie Collins lifts lid on McLaren and Aston Martin pressure cooker

Daily Mirror

14 hours ago

Exclusive: One of the newest faces to the Sky Sports F1 punditry team, Bernie Collins brings with her a wealth of knowledge and experience as an engineer and strategist for McLaren and Aston Martin
If you've ever overprepared for something, be it school exams, a job interview or a big family trip, chances are you still haven't experienced anything like what Formula 1 strategists go through on a weekly basis.
Bernie Collins knows the score, having worked as head of strategy at the Aston Martin F1 team. For more than 20 races every year, she and her colleagues would get themselves as clued-up as possible about what every race weekend might hold, to the point that the vast majority of that work would go to waste.
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"I would say 90 percent of the prep that we've done was never used," said Collins. "Because it is all these edge cases that may not be useful for that race. But that leads to everyone feeling much more prepared, meaning that when you do have something a little bit off the wall, everyone's ready for it – or at least there's a slight plan in place for it.
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"We spent a lot of our time – most of our time – looking at what-if scenarios. Not necessarily plan for the best case but always planning for all of the other alternatives. Looking at what's happened historically, looking at what other teams have done in the race before trying to really dive into the detail that's needed."
Collins was already a very experienced operator in the F1 paddock long before she took over the leading strategy role at Aston Martin in 2020. She had been with the team for five years at that point, having joined when it was still branded as Force India, where she worked closely with the likes of Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg.
She had previously worked at McLaren where she served as performance engineer to World champion and future Sky Sports colleague Jenson Button for a spell. She quit Aston Martin in 2022, citing the ever-increasing strain placed on staff by an expanding race calendar, and has since made the leap into broadcasting.
Collins was snapped up by Sky Sports where she has become a key part of the broadcaster's rotating punditry team. It didn't take long for the Northern Irelander to become a fans' favourite for her keen strategy insight and affable on-screen personality, while she also works as a public speaker for the Champions Agency.
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Reacting to incidents in real time as a TV pundit comes naturally to Collins, having made a career out of split-second calls as an F1 strategist. "Communication on the pit wall can often be quite frantic," she said. "Things are coming in in a hurry, often you're dealing with two cars that might have two different problems.
"The F1 environment is very pressurised. You're making decisions often within 50–60 seconds, depending on where an incident is and where the pit line is. You're trying to decide whether to stop, and you're balancing a lot of data, a lot of comms.
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"A lot of that comes down to the preparation. Many decisions, you may have an answer for in your toolbox, from previous scenarios. The more prepared people can be, the better you can make those decisions under pressure. I've always taken a lot of time to try and go through those scenarios in advance, and then do analysis.
"If you made a decision, why was it the right one? And, in perfect hindsight, would you do the same thing again? Try to remove all the emotion from it. That continuous process means that, going forward, you feel stronger to make those decisions under pressure."
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But while she was head of the strategy at Aston Martin, it remained very much a team effort. "In F1, we're under-resourced. We don't have all of the people that you would have at the time that you need them. So, you need to rely on the most junior members of the group. They have a specific role, specific information they're looking for, and they're feeding that up to whoever it is.
"You have to rely on that information, you have to trust that information. It's about trusting your experts and the feeling they're in, such that we don't have time for everyone to double-check the answer. If there's a mistake, if there's an error, we run through it later. It means that you're developing the junior members of the group to really fulfil their role going forward.
"It is easy, especially in strategy, once you've done a pit stop, to say, 'That's clearly not the right decision.' It is always very obvious one lap later whether it was right or wrong. What's important is that you either change the procedure, change the data you're looking at, or change the process such that the decision is not made again. That is how the team learns.
"It was very obvious very quickly within strategy that you put your hand up and say, 'I don't think that was the right decision, in hindsight.' We go through all the data next week, go through the information we had at the time, and figure out what we could have done differently. All of that goes back into relying on people – the faith in themselves to make decisions under pressure really quickly."