Coffee with the Council Podcast: Meet This Year’s Europe Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Bernie Collins

This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsor, Feroot.

Welcome to our podcast series, Coffee with the Council. I'm Alicia Malone, Director of Communications and Public Relations for the PCI Security Standards Council. Today, I am so excited to bring you a sneak peek interview with PCI SSC's Europe Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Bernie Collins. 

Bernie Collins is a Formula One Strategy Analyst and former Race Strategist, who has worked at the highest levels of motorsport, including Aston Martin. She specializes in decoding the complex world of F1 strategy, from tire choices and pit stops to race day decision making and translating it into insights fans can truly understand. You might recognize her from her expert commentary on Sky Sports F1, where she breaks down the fast-paced world of Formula One with clarity and precision. With a background in mechanical engineering and years on the pit wall, Bernie brings both technical expertise and real-world racing experience to everything she does. I'm thrilled to have you with us today, Bernie.

Bernie Collins: Thank you so much for having me, and I'm looking forward to our chat over the next few minutes and I'm looking forward to joining you all as the keynote speaker at your event at the Europe Community Meeting.

Alicia Malone: We're very excited to have you as well. So, Bernie, I've just introduced you as an F1 analyst and a race strategist, but I'm curious, how do you define yourself? What title best suits you?

Bernie Collins: Yeah, I think F1 strategist probably best suits me. That's the role that I'm most widely known for. It's a role that I guess I felt most comfortable in. And yeah, you know, first and foremost, I'm an engineer, but I think that final role as the F1 strategist is the one that suits my expertise within the field the best, I think.

Alicia Malone: So, I'm always interested in hearing how people like you find their way into something like F1. Did you always want to be a strategy engineer? What is your story? How did you get started in this realm?

Bernie Collins: Yes, it's a bit of an unusual story. I think lots of people always want to work in F1. They enjoy trying to make it to that field. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I really enjoyed mathematics and physics at school, and I was sort of a bit unsure what to do with those subjects or where I could bring it. So, I did engineering. I did a mechanical engineering degree because that was quite broad and there were lots of things I could do with that at the end. I didn't really have a target. I didn't have a goal. 

Midway through that degree, I sort of became involved in some motorsport and I saw the opportunity to maybe go into some motorsport. I went on to join McLaren in their graduate program, which was sort of a year-long program. At the end of that, I moved into their design office and spent a few years working there. I had this real desire to work at the track, and I spent a lot of my weekends trying to work in Junior Formula or more grassroots motorsport in order to try and achieve that ambition to be at the track. And I spent the 2014 season as Jenson Button’s performance engineer. So, quite a different role to strategy.

But then in 2015, I decided to move teams, and I moved from McLaren to Aston Martin. And it was during that switch that the job role that was available at Aston Martin had a portion of strategy involved in. That was the beginning of my journey into the world of strategy, where I sort of remained until the middle of 2022.

Alicia Malone: Wonderful, wow. What do you enjoy most about what you do and what do you find are the biggest challenges that you encounter?

Bernie Collins: I think what I enjoyed about being a strategy engineer was the adrenaline; that like, sort of, impulse decision on the pit wall. I liked, in many ways, the influence that you had over the race results. So those split-second decisions when you got it right and, you know, everything came together well, and you got a better result than the team expected. There was a really good feeling in that, that teamwork element, I quite enjoyed. There were obviously difficulties, you know. There were events that went badly or decisions that went badly. And that was the bit that was more of a struggle, sort of taking that responsibility on your shoulders. But I enjoyed those aspects. I also enjoyed, you know, no job was the same. It was never a nine to five day. There was always a different challenge, always a slightly different environment. And so, yeah, I enjoyed the not routineness of it. I enjoyed the sort of everyday being a little bit different.

Alicia Malone: So, in our world, in the payment security industry or in cybersecurity, we talk a lot about identifying and analyzing risk to reduce damage from threats. F1 analysts in a way seem to follow a similar principle, studying the huge amounts of data you collect to make decisions that have an impact on a race. Can you walk us through how your role helps achieve that goal?

Bernie Collins: Yeah, so I think there are lots of similarities between F1 and many, many other industries, I think it must be said. But when we look at strategy on the pit wall, we think about when we're going to do a pit stop, what tires we might fit. So, the default plan, the Plan A, is actually reasonably easy to organize because it's just the best race to the end, the quickest race to the end, the checkered flag.

Whereas, actually, what makes good strategy and the teams that achieve the most and get the best results from the race, they're actually teams that react the best to what goes on around them. So, the external events, the safety cars, the weather changes, the accidents, all of these things. And it's those external events and how we react to them that get the best result in the way it does for many, many other industries. But a lot of what we do in order to get there, to have the best reaction is really prepare using historical data. And we run the sort of concept that if we've come across an issue ever before, then we should have a plan for it. We should have a method of reacting to it.

And a lot of that involves going back through historical data, looking at the likelihood of something happening like, for example, the likelihood of a safety car, and then get ready to manage that, to manage that developing situation. So, a lot of the lap-by-lap decisions, the very quick decisions that we made, a lot of those are made a little bit easier by having planned or prepared for the likelihood that that might happen.

Alicia Malone: It sounds like there are many variables to consider in analyzing that data. One other thing in the payments industry, and in all industries really, that is becoming more prevalent is the use of AI. AI is really shaking things up across industries, including summarizing big data, like what we just talked about. When it comes to F1, how is artificial intelligence helping us predict a race outcome more accurately than before? Are there any exciting examples of AI making a tangible difference in race preparedness?

Bernie Collins: Yeah, so I think AI is a growing brand of industry. It's a growing technique across many industries, like you say. And I think that it's been in use in F1 for a long time. The most common use, or the first use, was really to optimize car setup. But from a strategy use, it's growing all the time. We've been collecting a lot of data in F1, historical data. And up until recently, we've not really had the capability to correctly filter or sort through that data very quickly. And that's one of the areas that AI is really helping us, where we have collected all this historical data for a very long time and not necessarily been able to dig into it and use it. So, for example, for any event, we can look at when the last time that session was wet or at a certain track temperature or certain wind conditions. And all that data existed before. It's just now we have a real easy way of digging into it and finding the right answer quickly and that empowers us to make those fast-paced decisions. 

From a strategy side, we've been using a lot of machine learning in order to run, we run hundreds of thousands of simulations generally in the evening before the next day on a circuit. So, we collect some data during the day about our tire model or whatever it is that we're trying to answer. And then that evening we run those machine-learning models with all of the inputs that we've collected through the day in order to try and foresee what the race might look like, to have a lot of variability in strategies that others might try to do, in pit stop windows, in how the tires might change.

So, we run, you know, this magnitude of simulations in order to hone in on what we believe is the right answer, the most likely way the race will go. That happens quite regularly on a Friday or Saturday night when the race is due to take place on Sunday morning. We're now at a point where teams can continue to run those models through the race. So, every lap of the race, the unknowns are reduced because you've got a better read on how others are performing or what tires they have remaining, for example. And now, lap on lap, we're able to complete those simulations again and again and again. And that has given us more and more information about how the remainder of the race might look. And that's very, very valuable to what we can do. 

I think from my own experience, there was a race that we completed in 2020 in Barion. It was the only race that I've won as a race strategist. And, on a Saturday night, through running the machine-learning models, through looking at lots and lots of different possibilities of what might happen, we knew that the tire we were starting the race on, because of a regulation, was not actually what we would do if we had total freedom. So, normally you'd restrict yourself to only looking at what you could do legally. But, in this case, we looked at all of the possibilities of what we could do. So, we had a multitude of answers of which tire we thought was best. We had an accident on lap one, which forced us to do a pit stop. But because we'd done the work on all of the other strategies that were possible out there, we knew that we should switch to a different type of tire. And that allowed us, along with a few other external events, to go on and make some good decisions that got us in the position to win that race, which we were not really expected to do from the outside. So, I think this ability to go through and prepare for situations that if you were just doing it manually or in a slower way, you wouldn't necessarily have the time to do and look at lots and lots of different environmental effects, which really, really helps as a strategist on the pit wall.

Alicia Malone: It's amazing how much goes into your strategy and your planning for these races. I'm just so fascinated by what you've just mentioned and it's incredible how the use of AI has really helped transform industries like yours. Well, we're very excited to see you on stage this fall as our keynote speaker at our Europe Community Meeting in Amsterdam. Without giving away your keynote, can you give us a little sneak peek at what we might expect to hear from you? What do you want audiences to take away from your presentation?

Bernie Collins: Yeah, so I think that like everyone in the room probably takes away something different, but the idea for me is people take away two or three tangible things that they can change, whether that be in their department, within their company, within their daily lives, whatever it might be. I think some of it we've touched on already. You know, for me, a key thing of F1 strategy is preparation and we take that to the next level. So, I want to sort of emphasize and get that across to people. And I want to use the strategy example, but I want to use more simple examples as well in order that they can then take that and repeat that to their groups or their colleagues or whatever the case may be.

The other big passion of mine is analysis and how we look at our performance, how we ensure we're getting the best out of ourselves and others in a way that continues the group to grow, continues the team to grow. So hopefully we can touch on a few of those things. And we'll always do it from this standpoint of looking at from the strategist and the pit wall. But looking at a much more simple example, you know, probably we'll look at a pit stop, and we'll say, how does it work in a pit stop? And if we can do it in that environment, then we can certainly apply it to many, many other industries.

Alicia Malone: Well, I am so excited to hear your keynote. I think this is going to be so fascinating. And since you are on Coffee with the Council, we like to ask our guests how they take their coffee. Or, if you're not a coffee drinker, what do you prefer instead?

Bernie Collins: This is a very easy one for me because I am not a coffee drinker. Because of my Irish roots, I'm a very heavy tea drinker. So, I drink a lot of tea. And I don't know if the translation comes across, but here we call it Builder’s tea. So, it's just like English breakfast tea with some milk in it, no sugar.

Alicia Malone: That sounds great. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Coffee with the Council, Bernie, and we look forward to seeing you at the Community Meeting this fall.

Bernie Collins: Yeah, thank you very much again for having me and I look forward to meeting everyone and hopefully I can bring some of the learnings of F1 to you at the Europe Community Meeting in Amsterdam.

Alicia Malone: You can catch Bernie on stage as the keynote speaker at PCI SSC's Europe Community Meeting in Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 14th through the 16th. Registration is now open on our website, and we hope to see you there.

This episode of Coffee with the Council is brought to you by our podcast sponsor, Feroot. 

Like what you’ve heard? Subscribe to PCI SSC’s “Coffee with the Council” podcast by visiting any of the following platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Anchor, Castbox, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Audible, Overcast, or Pandora.