Bernadette Collins

Bernadette Collins is a strategy analysis for Sky Sports F1 and an ex strategy engineer from Northern Ireland, who most recently worked outside Sky Sports F1 was for the Aston Martin Formula One team. She began her career as a trainee with McLaren after graduating from Queen's University Belfast in 2009. Three years later, Collins became a performance engineer and became its leader in that role full-time in 2014, working for 2009 World Champion Jenson Button. She joined Force India in 2015 and helped the team finish fourth in the following year's Constructors' Championship. Collins was an ambassador for the United Kingdom government's Make it in Great Britain campaign in 2012, and featured on Forbes 2016 list of 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing & Industry in Europe. Collins was born in around 1985/1986. She is from the village of Maguiresbridge in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Collins' father works in a garage but not as a mechanic. She described herself as a partial "tom-boy" because she built and dismantled farmyard machinery with her father. Although she did not intend to be employed within motor racing, Collins was undecided on her future career during a period of five years at Mount Lourdes Grammar School. Eventually, she chose to enrol on a mechanical engineering course at the Queen's University Belfast because of her like of mathematics and physics. Collins was one of three female students in a class of 30. Her interest in motor racing emerged in her final two years at university when she was part of the annual Formula Student programme that is organised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers where universities design, test, construct, and drive small-scale formula style racing cars. Following the completion of Formula Student programme, but before she graduated in 2009, Collins applied for a graduate trainee programme with the McLaren Formula One racing team after seeing it advertised through Queen's University's Mechanical Engineering department.