Meet the Women Competing for Ford at the Rebelle Rally, the Longest Off-Road Rally in the US

Ford’s line up at the 2023 Rebelle Rally, the Bronco Raptor, the Mustang Mach-E Rally, and the Bronco WildTrak

Who needs roads when you can build them yourself?

That’s exactly what these ladies did at the eighth annual Rebelle Rally, a 1600-mile rally through the West Coast’s many ecosystems, and the first women’s off-road navigation rally raid in the United States. Women of all ages and backgrounds came to the Eastern Sierras last week to kick off the eight-day rally, which rewards quick thinking and resourcefulness rather than putting pedal to the metal.

This year, 64 teams consisting of driver-navigator duos competed in the rally, where GPS and cell phones are all but nonexistent as the women are tested on their navigation and driving abilities. Winning the rally is less about speed and more about points: those who can find their navigation markers with as few setbacks as possible gain more points that are added to their total. 

The Rebelle Rally puts these ladies through rough terrains and 12-hour long days of driving all the while getting what little rest they can while sleeping in tents where temperatures sometimes drop to a bone-chilling 14 degrees overnight. Trudging through one giant treasure map in the middle of weather extremes using old-school paper maps is hardly a walk in the park, but for Laura Wanlass, it might come close.

Maria Guitar, Laura Wanlass, Kaleigh Miller and Bailey Campbell prepare their cars during the Rebelle Rally Prologue

“It’s nice to be out of society. You’re truly present, you have no other thoughts, nothing creeps in,” said Wanlass, who daylights as a lawyer in Washington state. “Then you go home and you can’t remember anything of your past. You can’t remember the password to your work computer. It’s that fast.” 

Wanlass is one of several women sponsored by the Ford Motor Company this year. An official Silver Sponsor of the rally, Ford has competed for four consecutive years at Rebelle, with five teams racing under the carmaker this year.

Although Wanlass might find it difficult to remember her day-to-day life outside of the rally, it’s for good reason: she and her fellow teammate Maria Guitar finished third and second overall in the 4×4 class in 2021 and 2022 respectively. This year, the two finished third overall, in the Bronco Raptor.

“We’ve been on the podium for the last two years,” explained Guitar, a day trader from Columbus, Ohio. “You start dreaming weeks and weeks and weeks out.” Guitar, who navigates as Wanlass drives, said this is the first year they’re sponsored by Ford, but that hasn’t made a difference in their strategy.

“We want the most, always. We’ve placed that pressure on ourselves, and so we have to just not worry about it and focus. Bring your best, do your best.”

The Ford Mustang Mach-E leaving the campsite to start in the Rebelle Rally Prologue

Ford brought four of their successful Bronco and Bronco Sport vehicles for another multi-year win after the Ford Bronco Sport scored a historic three-peat win last year in the X-Cross class. Shelby Hall and Rori Lewis finished fifth in the Bronco Raptor, and Jessica Moore and Melissa Clark came in first in the rally’s X-Class division, competing in the Bronco Sport.

Driver Karisa Haydon and navigator Trista Smith, who were the 2022 Rebelle Rally Cross Rookies of the Year and Stage 7 winners, moved up to the 4×4 class in the Bronco WildTrak this year. They finished sixth in the new division.

“We were rookies to the purest form. We had never driven off-road,” said Smith. “We trained the entire year for it but before that, we’re not super offroaders, we were not into motorsports and had no navigation experience whatsoever. So we just really dove in. And it allowed us to do really well last year.”

The duo explained they’re keeping to the strategy they employed in last year’s Rebelle, namely, how efficient they were on the road– or lack thereof. Haydon, a stay-at-home with a pair of daughters, ages two and four, got her time management skills while working in management at Starbucks. “I live and die by that kitchen timer,” she said as Smith joked she would get out of the car to see if they had reached their marker to receive points. “I’m the time controller in the vehicle. I’m like ‘We need to leave now to hit the next marker, and we only have a few minutes at this one.”

Haydon and Smith’s communication skills stem from their long cultivated ongoing friendship: while Smith and her family– who have been living nomadically for years– were driving through Portland, Oregon on a rainy day when their car broke down. Smith’s husband called his friend, Haydon’s husband, for a new alternator, who had one but was away. Haydon went to save the day herself, delivering the alternator and inviting the Smiths back to her home to fix the car.

Kaleigh Miller and Bailey Campbell prepare the Mach-E ahead of the Rebelle Rally

“So we just sat there and had some rum and coke in the garage,” said Smith. “And we hit it off and went from having no experience to doing trainings to going from zero to getting sponsored by Ford. It’s incredible.”

In addition to the four Bronco gas-powered cars at this year’s Rebelle Rally, Ford is also showcasing a new car that has yet to be released to the public. Bailey Campbell, a driver, and her navigating counterpart, Kaleigh Miller, are pioneering the new all-electric Mustang Mach-E Rally for the first time ahead of its 2024 launch for the mass market.

“The range thing is completely different from gas mileage. I think that’s probably the biggest change for me,” Campbell said upon her and Miller’s return from a day of driving during the Rally’s prologue, a practice day for competitors before the points start to matter. “That and the lack of noise. It was 50 percent laughter today because we’re wearing helmets and all you hear is us breathing and not the gas.”

“This is my first time in the car, let alone electric,” said Miller, a CPA living in Tucson, Arizona who has competed in five of the last eight Rebelles. “So we were in the car yesterday, testing out all the buttons. I think for the general public, it’s a pretty cool way to test out the range and the general environment.”

There’s no better way to test the range of an all-electric car than pushing it to its limit in the middle of nowhere on a single charge. Both the nearly 130 competitors and the rally organizers and staff are lodging at secluded campsites in three different areas of California throughout the rally, miles from the nearest outlet.

Rebelle Rally founder and race director Emily Miller

To facilitate not only the Mach-E but also four Rivians, the Rebelle Rally enlisted the help of a new ingenious charging solution as brought by Salt Lake City-based Renewable Innovations. 

Rebelle Rally founder and race director Emily Miller– herself a renowned driver, having won several momentous rallies and instructed over 8,000 people how to drive and navigate off-road– lauded the rally’s efforts to stick to sustainability in every aspect of the race, including the rally’s push to secure green hydrogen to charge the Mach-E and other fully electric vehicles.  You can read more about the use of green hydrogen and check out our other coverage of the Rebelle Rally here. Also read about the fun we had in the Ford F-150 Raptor R here.

“We have 800 kilograms of green hydrogen. It’s a lot of hydrogen, but it’s what it takes just to power these electric vehicles remotely and rapidly and to power the base camp as our backup to get down the road,” Miller said, explaining how Georgia and North Carolina are the only two locations in the United States to find such green hydrogen at that scale. 

The Ford Mustang Mach-E charging through energy provided via green hydrogen

Given the difficulty in sourcing and the financial constraints in securing such a large amount of green hydrogen, Miller explained that she and her team quite literally hit the books, putting pencil to paper and calculating how much energy the Mach-E and other electric vehicles would require throughout the Rebelle Rally’s course. 

“It’s every type of temperature, it’s every type of terrain, every altitude. We will go from 10 feet above sea level to 10,000 feet,” Miller said. “People tell me that they want their kids to do this. If they want their kids to do it someday soon, I was gonna have to figure it out. And it’s not easy and nobody is doing a long-distance rally like this.” In response to the push for more sustainable modes of transportation and referencing California’s ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, Miller said, “This thing’s not going to happen unless we figure this component out.”

And the competitors love that not only are they pushing themselves to the limit, but the organizers behind Rebelle are as well. “It’s also a bigger electric field than they’ve ever had before,” added navigator Kaleigh Miller. “But a lot of technologies have evolved over time. Tents now are clicks and we’re asleep that much faster. In this rally, every second counts, rest and drive.”