Bernie Collins

Why organisations work with Bernie Collins

• She ran race strategy at Aston Martin F1, a role that required committing several hundred engineers to a single decision in under thirty seconds, with the result televised live. Very few speakers have carried that kind of accountability.
• Her book with Maurice Hamilton, How to Win a Grand Prix, translates the mechanics of F1 decision making into a framework leaders can apply to their own operating rhythm.
• She brings a working broadcaster’s clarity. As Sky Sports F1’s strategy analyst, she explains complex trade-offs to a lay audience every race weekend, which transfers directly to boardroom and all-hands contexts.
• Her perspective on diversity in engineering is grounded in her own path through a male-dominated paddock, not in consultancy talking points.
• She is Irish, plain-spoken, and unafraid to be specific about what went wrong on a given decision. That honesty is rare in sports-adjacent keynotes.

Biography highlights

• Former Head of Race Strategy, Aston Martin F1, 2020 to 2022.
• Performance and strategy engineer at Force India, Racing Point, and Aston Martin from 2015, working with Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg.
• Began her F1 career at McLaren in 2009 as a graduate trainee, becoming performance engineer to Jenson Button.
• Formula 1 strategy analyst for Sky Sports F1 and F1TV.
• Author of How to Win a Grand Prix: From Pit Lane to Podium with Maurice Hamilton, Quercus, 2024.
• Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe, Manufacturing and Industry, 2016. Honorary degree from Queen’s University Belfast, 2023.

Biography

An F1 race strategist has around thirty seconds to recommend a tyre change that commits the team for the rest of the Grand Prix. Bernie Collins spent more than a decade in that seat, ending as Head of Race Strategy at Aston Martin F1, where she called the race at Sergio Perez’s maiden victory at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix.

Her route there ran through McLaren, where she arrived as a graduate from Queen’s University Belfast in 2009 and eventually worked trackside with Jenson Button, and then Force India, where she moved into strategy alongside Nico Hulkenberg and Perez. The team rebranded twice while she stayed in the same chair, which gave her an unusual view of how a technical organisation holds its culture together through ownership changes.

What makes Collins useful to senior audiences is the structure of the F1 strategy job itself. A pit-wall call blends incomplete telemetry, weather models, competitor behaviour, and driver feedback into a single recommendation, made under time pressure, with the outcome visible on live television within minutes. In How to Win a Grand Prix, her 2024 book with journalist Maurice Hamilton, she sets out how that decision is actually made, and what organisations elsewhere tend to get wrong about it.

She now works as Sky Sports F1’s strategy analyst, explaining those decisions in real time to a mass audience. The broadcaster’s discipline, saying what matters in plain language without hedging, carries into her speaking. Queen’s University Belfast awarded her an honorary degree in 2023.

Key speaking topics

• Decision making under time pressure
• High-performance team culture
• Strategy in complex, data-rich environments
• Leadership in distributed technical organisations
• Women in engineering and motorsport
• Risk and safety in regulated, high-stakes settings

Ideal for

• Executive leadership teams in fast-moving competitive markets
• Engineering, technology, and operations organisations
• Strategy, risk, and transformation functions
• Conferences on performance, decision making, and team culture

Audience outcomes

• A clearer model of how high-performing teams decide when evidence is incomplete
• A frank look at what accountability actually feels like when your call is public
• Specific examples of how F1 teams align hundreds of people on a single decision in seconds
• A useful perspective on women in technical roles from someone who sat at the top of one