Now a MotoAmerica champion, will Sean Dylan Kelly get the call up to Moto2?

Is there any better one-on-one battle in motorcycle racing in 2021 than the one between M4 ECSTAR Suzuki's Kelly and HONOS HVMC Racing's Richie Escalante, last year's Supersport champion? The two have been the class of the field all season, generally leaving the rest of the field behind. Until this weekend, no one was able to stay close to them over race distance, but Kelly's teammate Sam Lochoff continued his steady progression and won Sunday's race at NJMP.

Until today, only one other Supersport race this year was won by someone other than Kelly or Escalante. That one was the first race at Road America. If you only watch one motorcycle race this year, that would not be a bad choice, with about three dozen lead changes and a shock finish that handed a popular win to a privateer. See the highlights video below.

Kelly clinched the Supersport title with a near-perfect weekend in a near-perfect season, with 11 wins and 15 podium finishes in 16 races with two more races left next weekend at Barber Motorsports Park.

"This a very emotional moment for me. A dream come true to get this championship," Kelly said, not just for him, but also for his family.

"Ever since I started racing when I was five, they've given everything," Kelly said. "They left everything behind in the U.S. They took me to Spain and live there on pennies, everything for me, for this passion, for this dream." 

The 19-year-old racer from south Florida with the Irish name and the Argentinian parents is a lot like what you might design if you were creating a motorcycle racer for the 21st century. Serious about his job but readily flashing a 100-watt smile, he's multicultural and bilingual. His battles with Escalante, who is from Mexico, have created a new Latin American audience for the series with the races now being shown by ESPN Latin America. The two make their post-race press conference statements on Facebook Live in both English and Spanish.

Until Lochoff, a rookie in Supersport, kept up his steady progression and challenged the two this weekend, nothing has stopped Kelly or Escalante all year. At one point in the season, almost at the same time during a break between races, Kelly came down with COVID-19 and Escalante broke his collarbone in a bicycle crash, but still they kept winning.

Kelly's resurgence has been a team effort, with the M4 ECSTAR Suzuki team finding a way to shave a few pounds off the aging GSX-R600 and take advantage of the 9.6-pound addition the MotoAmerica rulesmakers mandated 2021 for Escalante's ZX-6R "636," which has a 37 cc displacement advantage over the other 600s. Just as important, on top of that, was Kelly's seriousness in coming back stronger for 2021.

The next emerging American road racer?

Team Hammer, which runs the M4 ECSTAR Suzuki team and was originally co-founded by John Ulrich, also the publisher of Roadracing World magazine, is currently run by his son, former Superbike racer Chris Ulrich, and has plenty of experience, going back decades, in discovering young talent, from Kevin Schwantz to John Hopkins to Ben Spies. Chris Ulrich recalled a test Kelly did with the team when he was 15.

"His attention was on spot," said Ulrich. "He wasn't looking at his phone. He was focused on learning how to ride the motorcycle. He was very coachable. So we knew we had a nice package to work with. The coachable part is really important for a young rider. At the age of 15, he could deal with the pressure and he could take the feedback and soak it up and go after it."

In 2019, his first year in Supersport, Kelly won two races and finished behind his teammate, Bobby Fong, who won the championship. Ulrich said Kelly expected to win the Supersport title in 2020, after Fong moved up to the Superbike classs. Kelly did win five races last year, but he was overshadowed by Escalante, who gelled with his new HONOS HVMC team and the Kawasaki ZX-6R and won 13 races. The team showed Kelly that his race times, at the same tracks and under similiar conditions, were slower in 2020 than in 2019. The key, said Ulrich, was how Kelly reacted.

"He went back and improved himself," said Ulrich. "He looked inside himself. He did what a mature professional would do."

Is it time for the world stage?

Almost every racer in the MotoAmerica paddock has to wonder and maybe worry about what they'll be doing next year, but the question is probably more interesting in Kelly's case than in any other.

There's no question his ambition lies at the world championship level. 

"This is only my first national championship," Kelly said. "I'm going to keep on going, I'm not going to stop, and my goal is to be world champion wherever that may be." 

The question is whether Kelly will get the long-awaited call to move to Moto2. It's been a full decade since a U.S. rider has gone to a world championship series and made a big splash (Ben Spies, another Team Hammer alumnus, who won the 2009 World Superbike championship as a rookie). That decade-long drought hasn't helped the odds for U.S. riders looking for a shot at the world stage.

On the other hand, as I mentioned above, Kelly is practically a prototype of a U.S. motorcycle racer made for world championship racing. With so much of the MotoGP paddock now consisting of talent out of Spain, if one of the Moto2 teams makes the call, you know that Sean Dylan Kelly will be ready to answer and speak their language. In more ways than one.