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How This Formula One Strategist Is Breaking Barriers For Women In Motorsports

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Bernadette “Bernie” Collins, senior strategy engineer for Racing Point Force India Formula One Team, has been a substantial role model for young girls wanting to work in the sport. Her start at McLaren Racing laid the foundation for her future in motorsports.

Racing Point Force India F1

Formula One is one of the most prestigious sports in the world. In addition to the many high end sponsors the sport attracts, the technology of the cars is at the forefront of innovation for technological advancement. The Force India team is a relatively a newer team. The team’s origins date back to the early 1990s. Collins role is to create a plan of how the race might play out. “There are two strategists at the factory,” she states. “One for each car. We build up for the race. For example, how many stops there’ll be…is it a one-stop or two stop race? We decide what tires we're going to use. I convey central information about other cars, and for the qualifiers, we plan on what time we think the car should leave, how many laps we’re doing, etc.  We also create a driver’s plan. Through the race, we’re constantly adapting because nothing ever goes quite as planned.”

The week after the race it’s up to Collins and her team to conduct an in-depth analysis, going through the telemetry data received at the track and the Acronis Mission Control Center at the team’s factory in Silverstone, U.K. They analyze what they got right and what their competitors got right. Her job is to build a detailed picture of what happened during the race.

One of the obstacles Collins has had to face has been transitioning from the design team to becoming a hands-on strategist. “In design, everything is very exact,” she states. “Things are drawn to a fraction of a millimeter. However, in strategy, there's a lot more error that you have to be willing to accept and a lot more approximation of the numbers that you have to be willing to accept. You have to change your mindset from having very exact numbers all the time to field average aggregation. During the race you don’t have all the information, so you have to approximate.”

Racing Point Force India F1

Collins never made it her intention to work in motorsports. In fact, she studied mechanical engineering in college; she thought that would be a great place to start because she enjoyed the subject. Her first insight into Formula One racing came during a university Formula Student competition. It’s an annual student engineering competition where student teams from around the world design, build, test and race small-scale formula style racing cars. “It was an eye-opener for me,” she concedes. “I’d never considered the motorsport before. During the competition, I learned of the different Formula One positions.”

After the Formula Student competition, she earned a graduate position with the McLaren Racing team. The position enabled her to rotate every three months to a different department to learn the various roles and requirements within the team. She had the opportunity to work in the design office, vehicle science, systems, and car-build departments. In addition, it exposed her to many people which enabled her to expand her network.

“I joined the design office and became a designer,” she smiles. “I mainly worked on gearboxes. I enjoyed going to the race weekends even though that wasn’t part of the job. Then I got an opportunity to do the GT program [road car program] to go and support their customer team and race team. I’d help out a couple race weekends. To get involved, I did support for their own factory support team; for their emission control. I really wanted to work in that aspect of the sport. I raced for them in 2014 as a performance engineer who is an assistant to the race engineer. I tried to get the best out of the car for the driver. From there I joined Force India.”

Racing Point Force India F1

Collins states that she’s fortunate to have grown up in a household where no one ever categorized positions or roles by gender. Any role she wanted, she believed she could go out and get. Through every transition she’s faced, Collins relied on the following:

  • Make sure that what you're changing to is what you really want to do. It’s very easy to look at someone else’s role and think that it’s enjoyable or very easy to do. Until you volunteer some time to do it you won’t know if it’s something you want to do.
  • Convince your management team that you're going to work hard to make that position work; show them your drive to learn.
  • Train for what you want even if it means volunteering your time to learn the new skill. The more skills you have, the more valuable you become to the team.

With every pivot comes some form of sacrifice. For Collins, she sacrificed time. “Making the transition from the design office to the track site was most difficult,” she concludes. “Doing GT, I gave up 10-weekends a year volunteering. Losing time was the biggest sacrifice, however, those two-to-three years of volunteer time allowed me to gain trackside experience and realize this is what I want to do.”

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