Larry Lawrence | April 27, 2019
Could Sean Dylan Kelly be America’s next great road racer?
Sixteen-year-old Sean Dylan Kelly is the youngest rider ever to qualifying on the pole for the Daytona 200.
Sean Dylan Kelly has had a pretty good spring so far. The 16-year-old Floridian became the youngest pole setter in Daytona 200 history. He then came within two-tenths of a second of winning the famous race, finishing second to Kyle Wyman. He then finished on the podium (third) in his MotoAmerica Supersport debut riding a Suzuki GSX-R600 for the powerful M4 Ecstar Suzuki squad.
Kelly is coming off multiple seasons of international competition, including the last three as a full-time participant in the Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup. There, he demonstrated marked improvement each season and came to MotoAmerica riding the momentum of a championship top-10 ranking in the 2018 Rookies Cup with seven top-10 race finishes.
Immediately before his Rookies Cup adventure, the Hollywood, Florida, resident burst onto the global racing scene with a spectacular performance in the 2015 KTM RC390 Cup World Finals. Kelly showcased his immense potential by scoring the Race One victory and finishing the World Finals ranked second overall. That same season, Kelly won the RC390 Cup Championship in the Bike Racing Mexico series. Kelly also boasts an extensive list of accomplishments at the club level, both in road racing and supermoto.
Kelly got on the podium in his MotoAmerica debut in the Supersports class at Road Atlanta.
M4 ECSTAR Suzuki Team Manager Chris Ulrich is excited about having Kelly on the squad. He told us a little bit about how the squad came to sign him.
“He finished up with Red Bull Rookies and didn’t really have that much going on,” Ulrich said. “So his options were trying to go after Spanish Moto2 or Moto3 in the CEV before he got to the world championship. Really at that point, you’re going to need somewhere between two hundred and three hundred thousand Euros. Really that’s hard to find these days, whether you’re an established team or not. He did have some opportunities, but we got him working with Robertino Pietri, who’s a friend of mine and former teammate. He works with Sean pretty closely down there in Miami.
“We got him on the bike the Tuesday after the 2018 Red Bull Rookies season ended. It was a good test. I could tell. I’ve been watching Sean for a long time. He really came on my radar in 2015. Then I kept tabs on him, watched his results and watched what he was doing at Red Bull Rookies. Got to see him first-hand during a school track day out in California at the beginning of 2018. I really thought, okay, I could do something with him.”
I caught up with Kelly during his MotoAmerica debut weekend at Road Atlanta. In addition to his evident skills as a racer, It’s striking how well spoken and polished he is considering he’s just 16.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN J. NELSON AND LAWRENCE
How does it feel about scoring a podium finish in your MotoAmerica debut?
It’s a fantastic way to start. Not only happy for myself, but also for the team. We’ve been working really hard. Just happy to get started in this direction. It was a pretty difficult first day yesterday. My first time learning the track. It was my first time in the wet on a 600 yesterday morning as well, so a lot of new stuff, a lot of new information coming in. Still just learning lap by lap, really. I started in sixth, so it wasn’t the best place to start. The feeling was not the best this morning, but we’ve been working really, really good with the team. My crew chief, Jeremy, has been doing a great job. We’ve just been working in the right direction, really. Just taking things step by step. In the race, the bike felt very, very good. Just being able to see fast guys helped definitely just to get more track knowledge. Lap by lap I was improving. Just happy to keep working in this direction and happy to start the season in this way.
You came in with a lot of fanfare, winning the Daytona 200 pole, your experience in Red Bull Rookies. How did you come to the decision to go to race MotoAmerica?
Really when this opportunity came up, it was over any other opportunity I had. Of course, I come from the Rookies Cup for years, so the MotoGP paddock had really been home up to this point. I know many people over there, and I’ve made lots of family friends, many teams, just lots of contacts. But at the end of the day, right now Europe, it’s difficult to be there. If you’re not winning, you have to be paying. If you don’t have money and you don’t have sponsors, it’s very difficult. So it was a difficult time for my parents and me just in general for my family to really do everything, especially we had to move to Spain and been there for three years. It’s just really been a whole process. It wasn’t the easiest of things, but I’m very happy that we got this opportunity to be here in MotoAmerica with Team Hammer, especially now we’re really just getting settled again with my family. We’re back here in the States. Taking things step by step really and just happy to be here.
Did you grow up in South Florida?
I grew up in Miami.
Is that where you were born?
Yeah. I was born in Miami and raised in Miami until three years ago that I went to Spain.
Riding for the M4 Ecstar Suzuki Team, Kelly (311) isn’t afraid to mix it up like he is here at the Daytona 200.
How did you first get involved in motorcycle racing as a kid?
I always tell everyone most people are in this world because of their parents or their dad raced or whatever it is, but my parents were not into anything at all. The only thing was my dad was a car mechanic. That was the only close thing. But I guess I was just born with something in my blood. At three, I was riding my bicycle with no training wheels, so that was already like, okay, something is going on. And then I just like everything with wheels. I like cars, trucks, motorcycles, quads, whatever it was. Anything with wheels and especially an engine. Then when I was five I wanted to try go-karting. There’s Opa-Locka has an open go-kart rack. It’s called Miami GP Raceway.
We were like, okay. My parents said, yeah, we can take him to do some go-karting. So we went, and they didn’t let me because I was too young. Just a little too young. Just in front of the warehouse with the go-kart was a motorcycle shop. There was an Argentinian. My parents were Argentinian. So they just start talking a little bit, and it turns out that he had a little pocket bike there. He says, “Does he want to ride a pocket bike?” Don’t ask me how my parents let me. I don’t know how they let me ride, but they let me ride that day. They asked me if I wanted to ride, and what kind of question is that? I tried it there at five years old and had all my little gear and just tried a pocket bike. From then on I got hooked onto it. My parents got me a PW80, and I just started doing the local races and just step by step from there.
Kelly celebrates his podium at Road Atlanta with his sister and father.
So, did you race local club racing when you were really young?
Yeah. When I was really young, it was mostly all local. Mostly in South Florida, then I started going to North Florida, then it started all east coast. It ended up being until 2014 it was all east coast, up and down.
The young Floridian came within a fraction of a second of winning this year’s Daytona 200.
So you’re having a great debut. What do you envision your path being here from this point?
It’s a good question. I’ve gotten it once or twice now that I’m here in the States again. It’s really difficult to say because there’re still so many opportunities, and I’m still very young. Many things can change from this point on. At the end of the day, I still have my dream of being MotoGP World Champion. That hasn’t changed, whether the journey has gone its different routes, I still have that on the top of my head. But you never know what the future holds. You never know what might happen in a year or two or three or however much it needs to be. So, I’ll just keep going in this direction and just focus on what we’re doing right now, and then we’ll see how everything goes from here.
You were talking about the path over in Europe. Do you almost have to have wealthy parents or a wealthy relative or a company that’s somehow backing you to be able to progress now in that series?
Pretty much. Right now—I don’t mean to say it in a bad way for anything directing to anything or anyone over there, but it’s pretty bad when every rider needs to pay to ride. Kids get kicked off of their team just because another kid comes with more money. So, in that sense, it’s not the best. Money wins, which in life a lot of times money wins.
You might want to get Kelly’s autograph now so you can say you got it when…
Unless you’re winning races?
Unless you’re winning. There’re six championships, and there are 30 riders in each championship, and there’s only one rider that wins each. So there’re six that get free rides, and then there’s the other I don’t know how many hundreds that can’t. So where do you get a hundred thousand dollars from? Where do you get a hundred and fifty, two hundred thousand from for a season? So, I definitely didn’t have it. I won’t for a while. Hopefully one day I’ll have it. But it’s at that point where it’s just very difficult.
Let’s take it hypothetically and say you do really well in Supersport and you progress on through the ranks. Would you take a Superbike ride here for a year or two to see if you could progress in that area and then try to go back overseas?
If the superbike ride is a good superbike ride, of course. At the end of the day, if the opportunity is that good of one, like this here in MotoAmerica, especially considering how things are over there. But that’s actually exactly why I said you never know what can happen because things can change so much from one day to the other. Also, just things are much different here and much different in Europe, so you never know. I still have opportunities for Europe, too. It doesn’t mean I can’t do two things at the same time, either.
You look at somebody like Cameron Beaubier who had prospects and everybody thought he might make the jump to GP, but he’s in a position now where he’s making money here, good money, and it’s really difficult to leave that. Then you have somebody like Joe Roberts who maybe could have stayed here and maybe gotten a superbike ride and battled for a championship, but he’s over there sort of struggling. Is it more important for you to be winning races or have the potential to win races, or is it more important to be in a world championship event?
The thing is I’d rather be winning in the world championship. That’s my thing. I’d rather be living well, getting money and winning, but if I can do that in MotoGP, why not? Of course, it sounds a whole lot easier when I say it, but at the end of the day, why not? If that can happen. But like I said, no one wants to be on a bad team struggling in the back either.
Sean Dylan Kelly—get used to the name.
Have you had any discussions with Wayne Rainey or someone like that, who has good contacts in GP racing and has an interest in getting more Americans over there?
Actually, the best guy I would say right now is my boss, John Ulrich. I think that’s one of the reasons he had his eyes set on me for already a while now because I believe he really wants to do something. He’s already given me such big support just getting on this.
He helped John Hopkins.
Absolutely, and [Kevin] Schwantz. So they’re very, very good examples. We know he knows. I actually haven’t even met Wayne yet.
I look forward to very soon, hopefully really soon. Hopefully, together we can do something good for the future.CN
