As one of the sport’s first female strategy engineers, Bernie broke new ground in a high-pressure world traditionally dominated by men—earning the respect of fans and teams alike with her precision, leadership, and calm under fire.
Now recognised as one of the UK’s most influential sports speakers, Bernie is in high demand across industries for her unique insights into elite performance. A powerful voice among female motivational speakers, she draws on her frontline F1 experience to inspire audiences on themes of resilience, decision-making, and communication.
Whether booked as a high-performance speaker or to deliver talks as one of the UK’s most engaging inspirational speakers, Bernie’s story of breaking barriers and building winning teams resonates far beyond the racetrack.
In this exclusive interview with Champions Speakers Agency, Bernie shares what it takes to perform when the stakes are highest, how business can benefit from F1’s no-blame culture, and why being prepared is everything.
Q: From your experience in Formula 1, what does it take to build a winning strategy under pressure?
Bernie Collins: “Yeah, I think it's really interesting in that when you're devising the strategy for a race, there's lots of different aspects. So there's the individual race as it is, but then there's, you know, the more global full weekend strategy, or the more, like, individual sections that lead off to that race. So there's lots of split in terms of what you're trying to achieve.
“I think the biggest thing that I've learned is that having an entire team behind you all—even for a singular goal—is really interesting, you know, a really good way of working. But also we spent a lot of our time—like most of our time—looking at what-if scenarios. So 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—so trying to really dive into the detail that's needed.
“And I would say ninety percent of the prep that we've done was never used, because it's all these edge cases that may not be useful for that race. But that leads to everyone feeling much more prepared, and 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.
“And I think people like, let's say, the really boring one-stop strategies—where there's one pit stop and then there's thirty laps of nothing—but every lap we're discussing the what-ifs. We're continuously redoing the plans. So although we've only made one pit stop, we make hundreds of decisions throughout that, reused again, are never used. But it's that momentum of being ready, being prepared, having planned, trying to be in the best possible situation that you can be as a team.”
Q: How do you stay composed and make the right call when every second counts?
Bernie Collins: “Performing under pressure is an interesting one, in that 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.
“But a lot of that comes down to the preparation. So a lot of the decisions—you may have an answer for in your toolbox, from previous whatever it might be. So the more prepared the people can be, the better that you can make those decisions under pressure.
“And I've always taken quite a lot of time to try and go through those scenarios in advance, and then do analysis—analysing the whole session as well. So if you made a decision, why was it the right one? And, in perfect hindsight, would you do the same thing again? Try and remove all the emotion from it.
“And that continuous process means that, going forward, you do feel stronger to make those decisions under pressure.
“We also have a lot of—you know, like I mentioned before—trust in people. So people even at the bottom do feel empowered to speak up and go, “I'm not really sure about this,” or give their, you know, if they see something that maybe someone at the top has missed.
“And, you know, the support's really there for those types of decisions. And we don't have a blame culture—which might sound interesting to those outside—whereby it's easy, especially in strategy, once you've done a pit stop, to say, “Oh, that's clearly not the right decision.” And it's always very obvious, you know, one lap later, if that was the right or wrong decision.
“But what's important is that you either change the procedure, or change the data you're looking at, or change the process such that decision is not made again. And that's how the team learns.
“And 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'll go through all the data next week, we'll go through the information we had at the time, and we figure out what we could have done differently. And all of that goes back into relying on people—the faith in themselves to make decisions under pressure really quickly.”
Q: In a high-stakes environment like F1, what have you learned about effective communication during moments of crisis?
Bernie Collins: “Again, like all communication, the crisis just sort of ramps it up. So people become more emotional—it might be people shouting, etc. But it's all about still focusing on the right information, right time.
“It's trying to get the most crucial elements apart. So the typical example is if it's starting to rain—and that's normally the one where people are reacting quite quickly—you need to get the right answer. And there may be another issue with the car, or it may be that we think the soft tyre is better than the medium tyre, whatever it might be. But that's not what is important at that time.
“What's important at that time is whether it's an intermediate or a wet, not which dry tyre we think it should be. So it's about trying to focus everyone on the task immediately at hand, and not someone thinking, “Oh, I've thought of something important,” but it's not important right now. So it's just trying to escalate that.
“And often at that time, you need a leader. You need—you know, I've had my manager, for example, in the past has often come in and said, “Everyone take a second. This is what the job is right now.” And not sort of strength to speak up and communicate clearly.
“We have a lot of protocols: how we discuss things with each other, what the line of information should be, which channel on the intercom we're speaking on. And all of these things are designed such that, in that moment, there is like an escalated high-level channel where big decisions are being made. And then we have buddy checks to make sure, “Oh, the guy at the end of the pit wall that needs to call the pit stop, he's aware.”
“So there's lots of follow-back and support. You know, the biggest thing that I think people maybe don't think of in F1—especially on that pit wall situation—is it's not very political. And there is a lot of support. There is a lot of making sure that we get to the right decision on both cars.
“And that's the thing that I think business could probably learn from—is that feeling of support, feeling of teamwork, feeling of being in it together and getting the right decision together, regardless of where that decision comes from, is a really interesting mentality.”
This exclusive interview with Bernie Collins was conducted by Chris Tompkins.