Stephen Mallozzi on Joining RBR, Working at Outback & More

Stephen Mallozzi made his first oval start in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series at Martinsville Speedway in April for AM Racing. He recently spoke with Frontstretch about how he came to join Reaume Brothers Racing, working a day job at Outback Steakhouse and more.

Joy Tomlinson, Frontstretch: How did you come to like NASCAR and racing in general?

Stephen Mallozzi: I started liking NASCAR when I was a kid, I was probably 5 years old when I started playing NASCAR Thunder, and that was kind of how the love started for the sport as a whole. … That’s how it started for me, and that love kind of carried on. One day I told my dad, I’m like, ‘hey dad, we’d probably be pretty good at this in real life,’ and I was like 8 or 9 at the time. He was like, ‘No, that’s not really how it works.’ But then we went to an indoor go-kart track, we did that for a few years, and by the time I was 13, we started go-karting competitively. Once we started doing competitive karts we never really looked back. I took a little hiatus because my dad got diagnosed with cancer in 2016 and we thought that was going to be the end of my career. One day, I came back, I moved to Charlotte and I started learning my way around stock car racing.

Tomlinson: Could you tell me about how you came to know Josh Reaume and that group over there?

Mallozzi: Basically, one day, it’s 2021, I’m sitting in my room, and I’m pissed off, I’m just upset about NASCAR, I never got my shot, I always thought I’d be good enough to do it. I’m kind of being mean to my mom and dad and in walks my dad to my room, he’s like, ‘What’s the problem?’ I’m like ‘Dad, I never got my shot in racing.’ He gets frustrated, he gets mad about it, he’s unhappy by the comment that I just made. He turns around and points his finger at me and he goes, ‘Son, if I treated my cancer the way you treated racing, I would’ve been dead five f’ing years ago.’ I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s a pretty stout comment for the guy with cancer to make.’

So, I started sending emails, and I heard back from a Truck team that’s based on the West Coast, and there’s only one or two of ‘em so you can probably figure out who it is. I’m not trying to steamroll this guy, he was actually very nice to me, very kind. But at the end of the day, he invited me to do a driver development program that just didn’t work out.

At that point, once I got the invite to go do that, I…