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Bernie Collins’ technical insight has provided good value to audiences for Sky Sports - Sutton Images/Mark Sutton
For more than a decade, Bernie Collins accrued a wealth of experience at the highest level of Formula One. In 2014 she was performance engineer to 2009 world champion Jenson Button at McLaren before eventually becoming Aston Martin’s head of race strategy.
Her most glorious moment in F1 was the chaotic Sakhir Grand Prix in 2020 when Sergio Pérez went from last on the first lap to take a memorable maiden victory for both himself and Racing Point. Yet when Collins moved from the pit wall to in front of the camera two years ago, becoming an on-screen analyst for Sky Sports F1, the transition was an uneasy one.
“For a long time, I felt like I was a bit of a fraud, not doing enough work on the pit wall. I felt a bit like I wasn’t contributing as much to the sport. Before, the decisions I made directly affected the outcome of the race,” she says.
Her work at the heart of F1 is serving her well. In the past two seasons, she has become a reassuring presence, ready and eager to distil the complexity of myriad race strategies into plain language for viewers at home. Despite a lowering of the competitive stakes, there was some discomfort in the early stages of her broadcasting career.
“When you’re on the pit wall you’re very confident in your ability, you are very ‘in your moment’. You’ve done a lot of work on the data and you’ve got the support network around you. To step away from that and then be on screen, much more public facing was a bit more daunting.
“When I did my first race [for Sky Sports] in Jeddah in 2023, I probably didn’t really think about the number of people that were watching at home. I felt a bit initially like I wasn’t contributing as much to the sport,” she says.
The switch to broadcasting was a leap and there has been plenty of support from her Sky colleagues. The likes of Martin Brundle and David Croft – with hundreds if not thousands of commentary stints behind them – have been supportive.
“You can learn something from them every day that you are out with them. It can be something really minor like how they are holding a microphone or how they phrase a question to someone. I am sure I annoy a lot of people asking a lot of questions all the time, but I am really keen to learn.”
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Martin Brundle has been a mentor for Bernie Collins - Sutton Images/Mark Sutton
Collins, however, does not shy away from robust debates within the Sky team. Although her colleagues have decades of experience in the sport, she has the most recent and relevant direct knowledge of how things work in modern F1.
“I think they’ve learnt a lot about what happens within a race team and what happens on the pit wall. We have some quite strong discussions about what we think is going to happen. We’ve all got different opinions. I hope they have learnt something from me.
“There are times when a discussion will come up because of what is happening in practice and I’ll say ‘no, this is why teams do a certain thing’. I think it has been really good learning on both sides.”
Collins’ route into F1 was not mapped out in the traditional way, indeed she got into motorsport “the wrong way round”. Whilst races were on at home in the background, it was not until her mechanical engineering degree at Queen’s University Belfast that she even considered motorsport as a career.
“I think a lot of people [on the course] end up thinking of working in aerospace or those big shipyards in Belfast. People think about those types of industry when they think about mechanical engineering,” she says.
In her time at Queen’s she and six other students took part in the yearly Formula Student competition, where universities and colleges design and build a single-seater racing car within a set of regulations. The 2009 competition held at Silverstone turned out to be a defining moment.
“They were taking down all the stands and clearing up all the stuff from the grand prix that happened a few weeks before. We did a straight-line run on the start/finish straight – the old one, and that was really good fun. That is what spurred my desire to get into motorsport.”
Collins then made it onto McLaren’s graduate scheme in 2010, but merely entering the McLaren Technology Centre for her interview with Paddy Lowe and Jonathan Neale will always be looked back on fondly.
“You go under the tunnel into McLaren and then you go out in the lift and the boulevard is full of all the old Formula One cars. There’s an entire line of McLaren’s history.
“I just thought ‘wow, even if this is all that happens, I’ve gotten to do this interview and seen this building and all these really cool old cars and walk among them, then I am pretty happy with my day out’.”
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Bernie Collins was a McLaren Performance Engineer, working alongside Jenson Button - LAT Images/Glenn Dunbar
She has not looked back since that day 15 years ago. As she enters a third season for Sky, it is easy to imagine her becoming a staple of Sunday viewing for the next generation of F1 fans. Though those first races in front of the camera were uneasy in some aspects, Collins now has a new acceptance of the importance of her broadcasting role.
“When you get out and speak to people in the real world, that is when it really brings it home to me the difference I make to whoever the viewer is at home. The more people I interacted with from the audience, the more I realised that actually my influence on the viewer is much bigger than it’s ever been before.”
Sky Sports is the exclusive home of Formula 1 in the UK & Ireland. Don’t miss the Chinese Grand Prix, March 21-23, only on Sky Sports and NOW
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