The Crew
Team 128 leaves Las Vegas in October with a podium finish in its history and nobody on board who was there for it. Racine Warner drives. Diane Walsh navigates. Neither has competed in the Rebelle, and neither has competed in anything with a start line before.
They met in high school in Utah and have been friends for more than twenty years. Both live in Midway. Between them they have six children and two careers in medicine.
Racine trained as a nurse, with degrees from the University of Washington and the University of Utah in psychology and nursing. She raises four children and describes that as the work she has chosen for this stretch of her life. She learned to drive in her father's white 1991 Range Rover in the red rock outside Moab, on family trips that ran several times a year. She also keeps a private practice of picking one thing every year that scares her and working at it until it scares her less. A half marathon run down a mountain. Youth mountain bike rides she leads herself. This year the thing is eight days in the desert with a map.
"This is my first foray into motorsports, and I'm embracing being a beginner. I have no idea where it might lead, and I love that. I hope someday I'll look back and say, 'The Rebelle was my origin story.'"
Racine Warner, Driver
Asked in her entry to name her greatest adventure to date, she wrote motherhood. "Four kids, no map, constantly changing terrain, and the greatest adventure of my life."
Diane is an emergency physician. Nursing school at Brigham Young University, medical school at the University of Utah, residency in Maine. She has climbed Kilimanjaro and Rainier, traveled in thirty-three countries, and spent two hours buried in snow for an avalanche study. Her work is deciding under a clock with incomplete information and people watching. The Rebelle asks her for the same thing at eleven miles an hour. The instinct for unpaved routes is inherited. Her mother earned the family nickname Two-Wheeled Sharon by taking the off-the-beaten-path way to every trailhead. Asked why the Rebelle and why now, Diane's full answer runs one line.
"Why not? I just learned about Rebelle in the last year and knew immediately I HAD to do it!"
Diane Walsh, Navigator
Racine asked her to navigate because she wanted someone unflappable, tenacious, and someone she could still love after eight dusty days in a car. Diane describes her own attention to detail as bordering on neurotic, which in a navigator is a hiring qualification.
The Name
A team name at the Rebelle usually tells you what a crew wants you to think. This one tells you what they intend to be measured against.
"Our team name, Yesterday's Rival, perfectly captures my approach to competition: my biggest competition is the person I was yesterday."
Diane Walsh
That reads as modesty until you look at how the rally scores. Standings move on precision rather than speed, and a crew's score is mostly the sum of its own errors. Nobody blocks you. Nobody passes you. The only competitor who shows up in the cab every day is the version of the crew that plotted yesterday's checkpoints, and the day's result is the difference between the two.
They ground the name deeper than scoring. Their team bio says the belief under it is their faith in Jesus Christ, and that who they are becoming matters more than what they accomplish. That is their framing in their own document, and it stays theirs on this page.
The objection writes itself. A team that competes against itself sounds like a team lowering the bar before the start. Racine closes that door herself.
"I'm competitive and I'm used to expecting a lot from myself. I like being good at things, and if I'm being completely transparent, I really like winning. The Rebelle is humbling because I'm stepping into something where I can't reasonably expect to be great right out of the gate."
Racine Warner
Holding both positions at once is the hard part, and it is the reason the name is worth printing rather than a line to be polite about.
Tony Warner put the same idea on the record after the 2025 rally.
"When these women cross the finish line, they know who they are. Not because the rally gave them identity, but because it uncovered it."
Tony Warner · Forbes, December 2025
Helga Starts Her Third Year and Inherits Nothing
The third member of the team has done this twice. Helga is a 2024 Grenadier Trialmaster, and the crew's entry describes her in one sentence: her name is Helga, this is her third Rebelle Rally, and she hasn't missed one since she was born. In October 2025 she finished third with Susan Pieper driving and Elise Young navigating, the first INEOS Grenadier to reach a Rebelle podium. Her crew changes every year.
So the number on the door carries a result that Racine and Diane did not earn and cannot lose. A rookie crew in a proven truck starts the week with the equipment question already answered and every other question still open. That is the trade. They will not spend a single checkpoint wondering whether the vehicle is the problem, which means every mistake that happens is theirs to find and fix, on the day, in the sand.
A new topographic wrap goes on between 14 and 18 September. The truck in these frames still wears the 2025 decals, because the photographs were made in August while the crew was learning to get stuck on purpose.
What Eight Days Asks of a Beginner
What she carries them into deserves plain numbers. The Rebelle covers roughly 2,800 kilometers of the desert Southwest over eight days, which is about 1,740 miles. GPS and phones are banned for the duration. Teams work from paper maps at 1:100,000, solve more than twenty checkpoints a day, roll out around five in the morning, and pitch their own camp ten hours later. Two nights have no village at all, which means the crew that drove all day also cooks, sets the tent, and plots the next morning before it sleeps.
Put a ballpoint pen on a map at that scale. The dot it leaves covers seventy meters of ground. The checkpoint has a radius of twenty five meters. The mark you make is wider than the thing you are looking for, and a navigator holds that arithmetic in her head while the driver reads the sand under the tires.
Every competitor faces that. A rookie faces it while also learning what the truck does when the front end sinks, how long a recovery takes when you are tired, and which argument at 4 p.m. is worth having.
Their August training session in the dunes ran on exactly that syllabus. They buried the truck to the bumper on a crest, dug it out, drove it out, and then pitched camp beside it to rehearse the half of the rally that happens after the driving stops.
The Bench, and What Changes This Year
The reason the truck is the one question already answered sits in West Valley City. Todd Kunkel leads preparation on every Grenadier Warner runs, with the parts counter and the technicians behind him. He paints bolts so a reference mark survives a thousand miles of vibration. He logs torque specs. He competes himself, so the work anticipates what fails at mile 900 rather than what fails in a service bay.
This October he joins the official Rebelle mechanics crew, which owes equal service to every team in the field. Warner gets no private channel to him for eight days. Whatever the shop puts into Helga has to hold on its own from the green flag, which is the standard the preparation was always written to, and this is the first year the record will show it.
The Sponsor
The entry itself also has an author. Tony Warner sponsors Team 128, and he is Racine's husband. She is direct about the order of events.
"My husband was actually the one who introduced me to the Rebelle. He somehow knew how much I needed something like this before I did. I wouldn't be here without him encouraging me to take the leap and supporting me as I've thrown myself into learning an entirely new set of skills."
Racine Warner
An entry at this level is real money, and Racine asked for that to be said rather than politely stepped around. Her reading of her husband runs past the check. He has spent his life introducing people to the things he loves and then getting out of the way while they fall for those things on their own terms. The sponsorship is that habit with a budget line. He funds women into this sport because he wants them in it, and the proof is that he gets uncomfortable every time someone tries to credit him for it.
The Charity They Named
Team 128 named the Jessi Combs Foundation for the Team Spirit Award and the International Cup. The foundation funds education and scholarships for women entering the trades and motorsports. A rookie crew choosing the fund that puts other beginners in the seat is consistent enough with the name on the door that it needs no further comment.
Racine and Diane will finish somewhere in the standings in October. The number will be true and it will not be the thing either of them checks first.