Being a former F1 race strategist, Bernie Collins’ technical knowledge of the sport is abundant. While she has left her job as a strategist on the pit wall, fans are hearing more of the crucial insights she has to offer about different races, as she has started working as an analyst for F1’s primary broadcaster, Sky Sports since 2023.
While Collins loved her race strategist role, she had reasons to leave it. With the ever-expanding stress of the F1 schedule, Collins explained on the Indo Sport podcast how the sport becomes quite exhausting for them. It is all the more tiring for the race strategists and the engineers, as unlike the drivers, they do not get any leave.
Red Bull mechanic Calum Nicholas decided to leave his role—one he held for over a decade—for a similar reason. While Nicholas only confirmed that he was retiring from his on-track job at Red Bull in February of this year, he did explain his reasons in an earlier interview.
“I don’t wanna do it anymore… By the time you’ve done pre-season testing, the old tire tests in the middle, and the Abu Dhabi test at the end of the season, you’re away for the best part — 200 days a year,” he said on the Road to Success podcast earlier this year. Now, Collins has expressed similar concerns about why she quit her job as a strategist by explaining how brutal the triple headers were for people like her.
“When you’re doing a triple header as a team, you start the week before doing all the prep work, your only time off on that three weeks is the long-haul flight, which is arguably not really time off, and often you’re still working on that and at the end of the three weeks, you’re just, you’re just broken,” she explained.
2022 Hungary was my last race on the pit wall. Always be a special memory. #HungarianGP #Strategy pic.twitter.com/OgviFcKOSh
— Bernie Collins (@bernie_collins1) July 21, 2024
The former Aston Martin strategist added that because of her previous job, she would rarely have any personal time, and so, she would rarely be able to attend any wedding, birthday, or any other family function. “So, I just decided it wasn’t really life to do 22 races,” she added.
She also revealed that she is much happier in her current role as an analyst and is grateful to Sky Sports F1 for offering her this job. “Now I get to do 10 (races) and that’s brilliant,” she concluded.
The reason Collins only has to cover 10 races despite Sky Sports covering all 24 races in the season is that the British broadcaster has implemented a rotational roster of presenters and analysts since last season. Sky Sports adopted such a system, understanding how gruelling it can be for presenters to cover all 24 Grands Prix in a season.
Even senior commentators and presenters like David Croft, Martin Brundle, Natalie Pinkham, among others are benefitting from this rotational system and are grateful like Collins.
