Latest news with #BernieCollins
Daily Mirror
7 hours ago
- Automotive
- Daily Mirror
F1 host Bernie Collins' life off-screen from real name to love life and feeling 'like a fraud'
Bernie Collins is a familiar face to Formula 1 fans as she comments on all the action from the motorsport as part of the Sky Sports presenting team She's the former head of strategy for the Formula 1 Aston Martin team but now Bernie Collins is a familiar face with fans as she provides expert analysis for Sky Sports. Most weekends, Bernie can be seen alongside other members of the broadcaster's Formula 1 presenting team as they bring all the news, highlights and live race commentary from the Grands Prix action across the world. Bernie, who is from Northern Ireland, is renowned for her experience as a strategist and fans rely on her guidance throughout the season. But how did Bernie land such a coveted role and what does she get up to off-screen? We take a look at her early career and life away from the race track. Real name and early career Born in the mid '80s in a village in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Bernie's real name is Bernadette Collins. She began her career as a trainee with McLaren after graduating from Queen's University Belfast in 2009. Three years later, she became a performance engineer, working with 2009 World Champion Jenson Button. She joined Force India in 2015 and helped the team finish 4th in the following year's Constructors' Championship. In 2022, she joined F1 TV as an analyst before joinging Sky Sports the following year. Love life Bernie is engaged to the former F1 mechanic Ryan McGarva and often shares photos of them on their travels on her Instagram account. They got engaged last December during a ski holiday in France. In an interview with Irish News she said: 'Ryan and I met a long time ago through motorsport, but the proposal came as a total surprise. 'Ryan actually got down on one ski and proposed during a ski trip to Tignes in the French Alps. We haven't set a date yet, but it is all very exciting.' Bernie shared the exciting update with fans by posting a selection of photos on Instagram from the year, with the final snap taken during their break capturing Bernie on the piste and showing off a sparking ring. She captioned the post: "2024 with a single picture for each month. Bit early but I'm pretty sure December can't be topped! (ring emoji)." Her colleagues rushed to congratulate the couple with Karun Chandhok saying: "Ahhh congratulations!" Natalie Pinkham said: "Oh Bernie!! This is the BEST news! Huge congratulations my darling." And Rachel Brooks commented: "Yey!!!! Amazing news! Congratulations!" The pair live in Warwickshire, reports the Irish News, and foster guide dogs. During the interview as she fostered her latest dog she said: "We look after the dogs until they find a forever home. This dog failed its training because he wouldn't put on a harness, unfortunately, but he will make a great pet for some family. "I got involved probably for a few selfish reasons, but it helps the centre out and is also a really nice way that we can have dog on a sort of part-time basis – while travelling around the world. And he is definitely helping my new year health kick by getting me out walking - at a nice normal pace." Feeling 'like a fraud' Bernie has admitted that moving from the pit wall to in front of the camera was an uneasy transition. "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 said in an interview with The Telegraph. "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. But she says she's learned a lot from colleagues like renowned commentators Martin Brundle and David Croft and now accepts the importance of her broadcasting role. She added: "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."
Daily Mirror
29-06-2025
- Automotive
- Daily Mirror
Sky F1's Bernie Collins lifts lid on McLaren and Aston Martin pressure cooker
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. "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. "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. 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. "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." 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."
Irish Independent
18-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
Cork protestors want updated wind and solar farm regulations
Cork Communities Alliance for Change is an alliance of ten action groups around the county. Their goal is to increase public awareness of the lack of regulation of wind and solar projects and their associated battery energy storage systems (BESS) and to put pressure on the government to pass appropriate regulations. Bernie Collins of the Gooseberry Hill Action Group, one of the groups in the alliance, told the Irish Independent that they are not against renewable energy, but are against unregulated or under-regulated sources. "There is a place for renewable energy, but it has to be regulated and it has to be away from people's houses, schools, villages, and in appropriate settings," he said. "And what they're doing at the moment is they're not doing that because there's just too much money being rolled out to developers to get these things off the ground to meet the 2030 [climate] targets. And they're basically putting the horse behind the cart instead of the other way around,' Mr Collins added. The current wind energy development guidelines date back to 2006. The wind turbines of today are vastly different in design, efficiency, and scale compared to when the guidelines were drafted, according to the Community Environmental Protection Alliance (CEPA), an organisation founded by families and communities affected by industrial wind turbine developments in Ireland. There are currently no central planning guidelines for large-scale solar farms in Ireland. Proposals for individual solar energy developments are subject to the statutory requirements of the Planning and Development Act 2000. Planning applications are made to the relevant local planning authority or, if appealed, to An Bord Pleanála. One of the issues concerning groups like Cork Communities Alliance for Change is the risk of a wind or solar farm's lithium-ion batteries catching fire. "Everywhere there is solar or wind going to be, there will be batteries because [former Environment Minister] Eamon Ryan brought a framework document in last year. And basically he was pushing for battery storage, BESS, with every renewable energy project, which again is putting the horse before the cart because there is no fire officer anywhere in Ireland trained for this," said Mr Collins. A fire at a lithium battery production plant in Claregalway in January forced the evacuation of a number of schools and businesses and saw five firefighters briefly hospitalized. The plant has since closed. In addition to the protest at next week's meeting of Cork County Council, two Councillors will put forward motions asking the Environment Minister to pause all further planning applications until there are proper regulations in place for wind turbines and also calling for solar and BESS regulations to be implemented. Similar motions have been or are being brought before other County Councils, including in Clare where a recent motion calling on the Council not to approve any more wind farm applications until the national guidelines are updated received cross-party support. Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.
Irish Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Formula One's Bernie Collins: ‘When you speak to people in the pub, someone will say that's an unusual role for a girl'
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. READ MORE '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. Williams driver Carlos Sainz talks to interviewers including Bernie Collins before the F1 Grand Prix of Saudi Arabia in Jeddah last month. Photograph: Mark Sutton/Formula One/Getty 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. As an engineering student Bernie Collins entered a competition that involved designing and building a single-seater race car and racing it against other university teams at Silverstone. Photograph: Queen's University Belfast/PA '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. Bernie Collins: 'Imagine the kudos for a company that sponsors the next female F1 driver? That would be a really big thing.' Photograph: Alan Betson 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.' Collins with British motorsport executive Jonathan Wheatley trackside before the 2023 Singapore Grand Prix. Photograph: Qian Jun/MB Media/Getty 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. Bernie Collins: 'I loved being on the pit wall, but I wouldn't give it up for the work-life balance I have now.' Photograph: Alan Betson 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 Prix Opens 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 rivals Opens 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.'
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
From rural Fermanagh to Formula One fast lane - how Bernie Collins blazed a trail for women everywhere
Bernie Collins isn't just one of the faces of Sky Sports, she is one of the most extraordinary Irish people in modern day sport. The rise and rise of the Fermanagh-born, all girls convent-educated woman through the ranks of Formula One as a design engineer before moving to television puts her in an extraordinary position. She is the one in the commentary box who knows what she is talking about when it comes to gearbox, transmission, tyres, pitstops and analytics. READ MORE: What channel is Isle of Man TT on? TV and live stream info for 2025 event READ MORE: Live GAA on TV this weekend with 13 Championship games set to be screened And the petrolheads out there - following years of commentators going 'wow, yeh', 'great, yeh', 'fast, yeh' - know it. Collins' passion is for the car and it shows, having served her time time an an engineer with McLaren (2009-15), starting as performance and senior strategy engineer and graduating eventually to head of race strategy at Force India/Aston Martin (2015-22) She proved a major force behind Force India, with Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg as their front-line duo, finishing fourth in the 2016 and 2017 formula One Constructors' Championship. While another high point came with their only F1 victory, for Perez, at the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain in 2020. Moving to F1 TV as an analyst in 2023, it took just a year for Sky Sports to come calling, by which time her book 'How To Win A Grand Prix, from pitlane to podium - the inside track' was on the shelves. Less about go-faster stripes and 'wow, petrol, yeh, driver, wow' but a deeper dive into the background, the pitlane, the car, the dynamics and the analytics it has been perceived as one of the most intelligent and accessible books ever written about the sport. 'I did engineering because I enjoyed it, I enjoy maths and physics,' says Collins who grew up near the village of Maguiresbridge in Fermanagh. 'And even though we've got a lot of good motor sport in Ireland, there's a lot of rallying and a lot of bikes, etc, I was never went to any of that when I was younger so I never really thought about getting into sport,. 'But I think there's more roles opening up in Formula One now that you can do, it is not just about Race Directors and drivers but the more that you dig into it, there's a lot of Irish in the middle of the action in various roles. 'Like I came to the front at the minute because I'm on TV and people are aware of me or whatever but, obviously, I worked in the area for 10 years before that so my family knew and stuff but not so much people in Ireland.' The greening of the pitland is continuing she says, Formula One fully fledged industry and they advertise looking for the best. 'I thought the engineering side of it when I started, there was going to be solely me but actually everyone has been really friendly. 'There's a lot of Irish in the pit lane in a variety of roles and I think that we've got some really good universities here that do really good degrees. 'There's a lot more publication of not just engineering roles, but of marketing, legal, HR is showing up too, you know, everything that any company needs, that an F1 team needs. So I think there's more of an awareness that you can go into it. 'I went to an all girls convent in Fermanagh, Mount Lourdes Grammar School, right. 'And no one was publicising engineering with regard to getting into it and and I think that attitude is changing and, you know, I think hopefully someone like me on TV is showing that it is possible to do a career with it and be successful at it.' In this Collin's progress, such a good story, has perked perceptions - Formula One is not the closed shop it was once accepted as. 'I think it started with a really good feature last year about my story and, I guess, when it was screened it was grand but before that you didn't really see much about working F1. 'I think the TV then only used to show the drivers and when you were never going to be a driver, you used just to work away, it was your job. 'Then when I did my book, I remember I did a book signing in Fermanagh, actually I did two, and the number of young girls that came to that was incredible. I would say 80 percent of the people there were young girls under 25 and it was great to see. 'So the support from home has been incredible, they love hearing the racing stories connected to Irish stories and the support has been fantastic from home and it's been great to sort of be picked to do that, to show that side of it, show the engineering side of it." Having left her job working on strategy for Aston Martin, Bernie says she was happy to take her foot off the pedal a bit in order to make more time for family and friends and work for Sky Sports. 'You end up missing a lot of real life, weddings, birthdays or whatever it might be. 'That's fundamentally why I left my role. I love doing strategy and I enjoyed working for Aston Martin but I didn't want to commit 23 weekends a year that I had no option to have off. 'There's very few jobs where you can't take a week off at some point in the year when you need to, so it just got to the point where I thought that was enough. 'Working with Sky, I do have that greater flexibility so having that extra freedom makes quite a big difference."
