Turbo Twins

“People out in California don’t take insults too well. In New York, we got ‘snapping.’ We snap at people and tell mother jokes.” Get more than two East Coasters in a room, close the door, and this will eventually emerge. With twin brothers Marc and Eric Kozeluh, it takes less than a minute. “We were raised by the streets of New York,” explains Marc. “All day long, if you’re not doing anything, you’re sitting around talking smack about somebody—breaking balls.

Californians can’t put up with our aggressive, abrasive attitude.” This presents a problem for the inseparable twins. They live in Los Angeles, having moved to the city less than a year ago to use the name they made from racing to open the automotive division of RPS Turbo Clutches. Right now, we are sharing one nub of a long conference table. The tape recorder is closest to Marc, because he’s not used to interviews and, accordingly, he speaks the softest. You see, the brothers have established a dynamic that has Eric behind the phones and in front of the cameras and Marc holding the wrench. But today, Marc is just as anxious to share his thoughts.

“The beautiful thing about growing up in New York is that you don’t hold back,” he says. “You put it on the table. People know where you’re at. They know where you stand. Like it or not, this is what I feel, this is what I’m telling you. You don’t have to try to read me. You don’t have to comingle with the rest of your team to try to decipher what I mean.”

This open book honesty is only one reason why Marc and Eric have stayed close to home for most of their 27 years. Another reason has been their success at the Performance Factory and World Racing. The two were a big part of Vinny Ten’s run into the 8s and an even bigger part of World Racing’s 2000 campaign, when Christian Rado claimed title to the fastest Integra in the World and nearly won the NIRA Pro FWD crown—with Eric as team manager and Marc as chief mechanic (Rob Smith from RPS served as crew chief).

So, how do you walk away from that kind of success? More curious, how do you relocate 3,000 miles away to a place that doesn’t look at the word “scumbag” as a term of endearment? For the Kozeluhs, all it took was another race car.

This past April, RPS was hired by Turbonetics to build and tune a tube chassis V-8-powered Toyota Celica drag car. Smith was assigned engine duties while Eric and Marc took care of everything else with the assistance of clutch specialist John Choe. “

Anything you can think of that it needs, it’s got,” says Eric. And he ain’t kidding. Here’s the setup: a four-cam V-8, 32 valves, billet crankshaft, cast-iron block, custom rods, CNC-ported cylinder heads, custom ground camshafts, custom electronics, 3-speed Lenco air shifter, big rear tires, billet rear-end active aerodynamics, Penske shocks, and two giant Turbonetics turbochargers. “You get a twin-turbo Supra, that’s a bang-up little ride. But imagine a twin-turbo V-8 on methanol with big tires and super big cams in it, so when it’s idling it doesn’t even sound like a turbo car. It doesn’t even sound like an import car.

[Insert untranscribeable motor sounds here.] It’s mean. It’s got a personality.” Four minutes separate the births of Eric and Marc Kozeluh on January 5, 1973. They were born in Flushing, Queens, New York. Their father was a New York City policeman, and when they were 14, he brought them into the precinct and had them fingerprinted just to make sure they were accountable for all their actions. That wasn’t such a bad idea. “Everyone we grew up with was a thief of some kind,” says Eric. “They were scam artists, would rob people, sold drugs—I mean, everybody we grew up with. But that was just a warm-up for life.”

The fact that the twins came out alive and kicking (and not in jail, on the street, or in a grave like most of the kids they knew) meant that they learned from their mistakes. “If you got out of line in the neighborhood, one of the older kids was going to kick your ass, with your parents’ blessing for f**king up,” Marc says. “If you bombed a pizzeria [with graffiti] or something, you got an ass-whipping and that was it.”

“Other cities are nothing compared to New York,” Eric adds. “It’s all easy going. All the other people we run into haven’t seen the toughness we’ve seen or been through. It gives us an edge on other people. It gives us an extra confidence boost.”

Then came the cars. Before they stood in line for their driver’s licenses, they had already yanked the motor out of a Chevelle and put it back together. They worked on cars on the street and dabbled with motorcycles. But it was after a brief episode with a moody Jeep Wrangler (Eric: “If it rained, it wouldn’t run.”) that pushed Marc into buying a ’90 Civic Si. The little red hatch satisfied all reliability problems, but Marc couldn’t find the power to win at the Brooklyn street races. After losing to a BMW 318, he put the car under the knife. The two found a new Integra LS motor and searched for a way to drop it into the car. It was during the hunt for motor mounts at a parts yard that they heard about a new shop in Queens that specialized in Japanese cars.

“With Vinny it was like magic,” says Marc about their first visit to Vinny’s Performance Factory. “You know when you get together with a bunch of people and it’s like magic? And then it goes away. But for that time that you’re together, it’s like magic.” Back then, it was just Vinny, the Kozeluhs, and mechanical guru JC Fermin. “We were all angry, and we were still hustling. Vinny just showed us that you could do something that you loved and get paid for it, which we never even considered as an option. It was a dream come true. Everything clicked.”

When the two joined Performance Factory, the paint on the floor was barely dry and Vinny was still only dreaming of a race car. All he had was the shell of an ’85 Supra, and the team had no idea what they were going to build. They just wanted to put the East Coast on the map. “That car was a piece of s**t,” Eric remembers. “Then we called around and found out that this place has a ’95 Supra with no motor and no title. Perfect for a race car.”

And Performance Factory was the perfect team for that race car. After its first full season, it became the first 10-second car on the East Coast and the first to hit 140 mph. It wasn’t long before it would make its mark as the first Supra in the 8s, measuring in with a low of 8.10@172. And Vinny made sure everyone knew his name. “Import racing was just starting out and we come out and we start wrecking shop,” says Eric. “It was all us. And it was fantastic.”

But for Eric and Marc, it didn’t last that long. Shortly after the Supra hit its first 8, ego clashes between Marc and Vinny tore at their relationship and the Kozeluhs left Performance. To hear them talk about it now seems like they left all their conflicts behind. In fact, they barely mention the breakup with Performance and dwell, instead, on their conviction that Performance turned their entire lives around. “The team combination is something that comes along very rarely,” Marc says. “You consider yourself very lucky and you enjoy it while you have it because, as time has proven, it doesn’t last long.”

Fittingly, it was another Supra that guided the Kozeluhs into the next chapter of their lives. One of the Performance Factory’s clients was Christian Rado, who was just dipping his heel and toes into the import waters. He also raced an Integra at various circuits on the East Coast. “One day, he calls up looking for spark plugs or something like that and I go, ‘What are you doing?’” Eric recalls. “[Rado] says, ‘I’m going to Florida with the Integra.’ And he asks, ‘What are you doing?’”

The next thing Eric knows, he’s heading to Florida as a temp on Rado’s team. On the long drive back, Rado tells Eric that he’s down for a serious campaign next season and asks Eric if he and his brother would like to support him, serving as team manager and crew chief. There was one hitch—they had to move out of New York. But it wasn’t that tough a decision. “Now, we’re getting a race car,” Eric says. “We’re going to build it how we want it. And we’re going to go racing. And I can work my phone deal to get sponsors for the car.”

“I knew if you let us do what we want to do, we could do some serious s**t,” says Marc. “And [building the World Racing Integra] was an opportunity for us to say F-you to everybody. Even though it wasn’t a rear-wheel-drive 8-second car, it turned out to be a bad-ass looking piece. The first one running really strong on methanol. We made retarded amounts of horsepower. We went 160 mph.” More important to Marc and Eric, the World Racing team established a level of professionalism that became the bar all other teams tried to mimic. In its first time out—at the NIRA opener in Moroso—the Integra broke four axles, but the World Racing team managed to keep the car together long enough to win the event. The Integra then went on to dominate the first half of the season. But Len Monserrat from “Big Len” Engineering was picking up enough points here and there with his Mitsubishi Eclipse to keep close. At the second to last NIRA event of the season, World Racing had a chance to clinch the driver’s championship title in Englishtown. But the car broke in the final round and Rado would eventually lose the title to Monserrat.

Losing the NIRA title ruptured the relationship between the Kozeluhs and Rado. The brothers don’t like to talk about the final races of that season and they only refer to it in generalizations. “Some drivers will think that their foot’s heavier than the next guy or they hold it down longer,” Marc says, and this is all I can get out of him. “But that’s not the case. The case is that they were given a better car. No matter what, it comes down to the car and the setup. So, if there’s a winning car, there’s a winning team behind it. And someone who built that car.”

Now, Turbonetics is hoping Marc and Eric can bring that winning touch to its race car. Two weeks before this interview, the RPS team was in a sweltering airport hanger in Alabama (home to Turbonetics’ parent company Kelly Aerospace) turning the final screw on the V-8 Celica. After firing it up for the first time, they brought the car to Bullish, a tuner shop in New Jersey, where the car dynoed at 700 hp to the ground at 7 psi of boost. They turned the boost up to 9 pounds and made 800 and change.

The Kozeluhs admit that a lot more work needs to be done before the car sees the track, but they are having fun being so far on the cutting edge of a relatively brand-new sport. When Eric talks about it, he does more than snap, his voice bites, spurts, and sizzles. “If you take a step back and look at the big picture, you’ll see that Honda is making the Civic Si for the youth market. Toyota built the new Celica for the youth market. They brought over the Subaru WRX for the youth market and sold a ton of them before they even had the first one available. Mitsubishi is bringing over the Lancer for the youth market. And this is all spearheaded by import drag racing, which we have been spearheading for six years.”

And as they have done throughout this entire interview, Marc finishes his brother’s thought: “Life has been crazy in general. Once we started taking cars seriously, it just got crazier.”

By Jonathan Wong

Enjoyed this Post? Subscribe to our RSS Feed, or use your favorite social media to recommend us to friends and colleagues!