MINI Rebelle Rally Results: Countryman Untamed Edition Finishes Third as Top Rookie

DimON · October 19

The MINI Countryman Untamed Edition was revealed on a Tuesday, handed to a rookie crew who had only recently met in person, and sent into eight stages and more than 2,500 kilometres of Nevada, Utah and California with no GPS. Ten days later, Felicia Killman and Erika Ferrer Lozano rolled into the Imperial Sand Dunes third in X-Cross on 1,149 points and as the class’s top rookie team, after a final-day windstorm turned the Glamis dunes into a whiteout.

The final standings

Carey Lando and Andrea Shaffer won X-Cross on 1,411 points in a modified Subaru Forester Hybrid, their third consecutive class win. Kendra Miller and Tasha Krug were second on 1,393, just 18 points back. The MINI took third, with fellow rookies Amy Hein and Abby Connolly fourth on 1,086. Only four cars were entered in X-Cross, against 41 in the 4×4 class, so third place needs to be read with that in mind.

The gap is the honest part of the story. The MINI finished 262 points behind the winner and on 68 per cent of available points, to the leaders’ 84 and 83. For context, our look at BMW’s history in this event noted that the X2 took second on its 2023 debut and that last year’s X5 finished second in X-Cross on 72 per cent. MINI’s first attempt landed a place lower than both.

On the last day, the margins tightened. By my arithmetic from the published totals, the MINI scored 173 points on Day 8, against 185 for Miller and Krug and the 188 and 187 posted by Lando and Shaffer and by Hein and Connolly. So the final stage was a respectable close, and most of the deficit was built earlier. Our mid-rally report had the car third after Day 4, and it never moved from that position.

The car was the other half of the question. The rally Countryman was a standard Untamed Edition with the smaller 18-inch accessory wheel and a more aggressive tyre, chosen for the taller sidewall rough terrain demands. Subaru’s own release describes its winner as specially prepared, so MINI went to the desert with the less modified hardware. The Countryman completed the course and ran in the pack, which was the pass-fail test we described in our preview of the entry. It did not show that the car collects points faster than a veteran Subaru crew, and nobody should claim it did.

One detail says more about the event than the leaderboard. On Day 8, the X-Cross teams ran the dunes together through gusts of up to 50 mph, taking turns leading to checkpoints and sharing headings and distances. Shaffer said the aim was to make sure every team in the class crossed the finish line. The MINI crew was part of that pod, which is a better advertisement for the Rebelle than any result.

What comes next

The 12th Rebelle Rally runs October 6 to 16, 2027, and registration is open. MINI has not said whether it will return. If it does, the better experiment is the same car with a seasoned crew, so hardware and learning curve can be separated. For now, the MINI Countryman Untamed has a third-place finish, the rookie standing, and a lot left to prove.