Sean Dylan Kelly

Sean Dylan Kelly, 22, will pilot the Top Pro Alpha M1000RR in MotoAmerica Superbike class for the 2024 season. Moving up to Superbike will be a challenge he is ready to take on after Kelly was America’s most exciting prospect in 2022 and 2023 with the American Racing Team and the move to Moto2 in the MotoGP series. The ex-Red Bull Rookies rider had previously been honing his craft over in the USA for the previous three years. 2021 marked a special year as he won the MotoAmerica Supersport championship.

Coming from a national championship to the Moto 2 World Championship was a huge step, it’s one of the biggest steps a rider can make, especially as Sean hadn’t come from the premier Superbike class like hhis teammate Cameron Beaubier had. For Sean, this didn’t mean anything, year on year he’s proven that he possesses an incredibly high level of talent after dueling it out with Richie Escalante for the 2020 and 2021 Supersport titles.

Sean Dylan Kelly was always destined to race in the World Championship, however, as with many riders his dream came to a halt due to a lack of money in 2018 after completing three years in the Red Bull Rookies. He had offers to race in the FIM CEV Moto3 Junior World Championship but didn’t have the hundreds of thousands of Euro’s that were being demanded by teams to be able to race in the series.

He came back to America, partaking in the Daytona 200 in his first race back in the States. He proved he was fast and on debut would become the youngest ever Daytona 200 pole position sitter at just 16-years-old. He wouldn’t win the race but had impressed his M4 Ecstar Suzuki team who offered him a paid ride in MotoAmerica with a two-year contract, there was no way he was turning that down.

These two years would prove to be successful spending much of 2019 learning the circuits before launching a full-on title attack in 2020, 2020 would be a stellar season for Sean who was racing a Suzuki GSXR-600, one of the only riders in national championships to still be riding the outdated Suzuki. He learned how to push himself to the next level and fight for the championship, he extended his contract for another year with the M4 Suzuki team with the aim of winning the 2021 Supersport title.

He also took part in the 2021 Daytona 200 on the Suzuki and looked incredibly strong with pace to win the entire thing, backed by 1-833-CJKNOWS on the M4 bike he led the final lap but a slight mistake from Sean’s part gave chasing rider Brandon Paasch enough of an advantage to slipstream Sean to the line and win by just 0.030 seconds, Kelly finishing in second place.

During his time of racing in America Sean had been part of the American Racing Academy, a subsidiary of the American Racing Team ran by Eitan Butbul and John Hopkins, the Academy was formed to help push American racers into the World Championship and Sean was proving time and time again that he deserved a seat in Europe, the team eventually deciding to hire Sean to pair with Cameron Beaubier in the 2022 American Racing Moto2 rider lineup, making it an all American affair as originally intended by the team. It’s worth noting that Sean did a race for the team at Valencia in 2019 on the KTM replacing Iker Lecuona who had stepped up to replace Miguel Oliveira on the Tech3 MotoGP machine, Sean impressed and showed many that Moto2 is where he belongs.

The newly crowned MotoAmerica Supersport Champion, Sean Dylan Kelly, clinched the title with Team Hammer Suzuki M4 with two races remaining, amassing 10 wins in 14 races, and will now make the move to Moto2™ next season. SDK will become the first member of the specially formed American Racing Academy to be promoted onto the world stage. This won’t be SDK’s first time appearing on the Moto2 grid, as the American was a late replacement for Iker Lecuona in the final rounds in Valencia 2019, after the Spaniard was called up to MotoGP™.