5. Chad Reed
2004 & 2008 AMA 250cc/450cc (Premier Class) Supercross Champion
Premier-Class Wins: 44
Most Premier-Class Wins in a Season: 10 (2004)
Also still racing, Chad Reed is the only non-American on our list.
Reed has been racing professionally since his early teens. In his native Australia, he was a multi-time 250cc SX champ before he was even a legal adult. From there, he spent a year proving himself in the 250cc World MX Championships before the USA came calling.
Reed hit the USA in 2002, and although he was contracted to race a Yamaha YZ250F four-stroke in the 125/250cc East, he lined up on a YZ250 two-stroke at round one and ran as high as second place (behind Yamaha’s David Vuillemin) halfway through the Anaheim 1 premier-class main event; Reed fell, eventually finishing sixth. After winning the 2002 East series going away, he moved up to the premier class in 2003, joining Vuillemin on Team Yamaha, and proceeded to win eight main events against defending champ Ricky Carmichael (who ended up winning the championship by seven points over Reed). With Carmichael sitting out the 2004 series, Reed handily won the AMA Supercross title with 10 race wins to his credit. From his full-time debut in the premier class in 2003, through the end of 2009, a span of 114 races, Reed finished off of the podium–outside of the top three–just 14 times.
After a forgettable 2010 with Monster Energy Kawasaki where he missed most of the 2010 supercross series due to injury, Reed started his own race team using privateer Hondas, TwoTwo Motorsports. In 2011, at 29 years of age, Reed finished only four points shy of what would’ve been his third premier-class supercross championship. Besides the two titles he’s won so far (2004 and 2008), Reed lost the 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2011 championships by a combined total of 17 points. Reed is also the only racer in history to win supercross main events on all four Japanese motorcycle brands; Yamaha, Suzuki, Honda and Kawasaki (he won a main event in 2015 on a green machine).
Now, Reed has returned to his roots at Yamaha. The 2017 season will mark the 34-year-old’s second year back with the Yamaha factory team.
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