Toyota's Rebelle Rally Teams Look Back On The Treacherous Motorsport Challenge

The Rebelle Rally is a grueling eight-day race that takes place in the unforgiving deserts of Nevada and California. It's a tough event that challenges the tenacity and ingenuity of its all-woman competitors.

No team knows this better than Kara Yde and Crystal Mink, who, on the second day of the rally, discovered the off-board odometer in their 2022 Tundra was not working and was in the wrong place. When precision and timing count most, the duo had to make a tough decision.

Yde and Mink decided to fix the device on their own. "We had to take a tire off. We had to install additional sensors. We had to fabricate something to attach the odometer [to] a different location. And we had to reroute the wiring. It took two hours after a long and hot day in the desert. And we were a mess after lying in the dirt under the truck."

It's all the more remarkable when you realize that Yde and Mink are not professional drivers; they're two of six Toyota employees who decided to tackle the demanding rally.

The other two teams Libby Perego and Caroline Koenig in a 2018 Sequoia and Samantha Barber and Becky Brophy in a '22 Tundra - also had to overcome their own obstacles.

"When you're under pressure like that, you quickly learn that you have to be very precise in how you communicate with one another. And I learned that you need to adjust to how someone else needs to hear the information," explained Barber, a senior manager in Strategic Business Planning.

Yde, who has competed in arduous half-ironman triathlons and describes the rally as "long, hot, and tough," notes one has to keep going. "You learn what you are really capable of, which you can then fall back on when you encounter new challenges.