Cars We Remember: In memory of Vic Edelbrock Jr.

When Vic Edelbrock Jr. lost his father in 1962, he inherited a ten-employee garage business and no roadmap for keeping it alive. Instead, the 26-year-old spent the next five decades turning Edelbrock into a -million-a-year name synonymous with American hot-rodding, while helping organize the entire performance parts industry through his years leading SEMA. His story is a reminder that some of the biggest names in muscle car culture started as reluctant successors, not industry veterans.

The collector car hobby and hot rodding in general lost one of the true legends of the sport/hobby when Vic Edelbrock Jr. passed away peacefully June 9, from complications of a cold. He was 80-years-old.

Edelbrock Jr. took over as president and CEO of Edelbrock at the age of just 26 following the sudden passing of his father in 1962. He took the Edelbrock company from 10 employees in 1962 to hundreds of staff and team members today. Edelbrock Jr. and family went from a cash flow of $200,000 when his father passed to todayâ€™s hundreds of millions in revenue.

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At just 26 years old, Vic Edelbrock Jr. inherited a company with ten employees and no real plan for what came next. His father, the man who built the Edelbrock name from scratch, had died suddenly, leaving a son who’d only recently graduated college holding together a small hot-rod parts operation that could have easily faded away like countless other garage businesses of its era. Instead, over the following five decades, that company grew into one of the most recognized names in American performance, and Vic Jr. became one of the most influential people in an industry most people don’t even realize he helped shape. How does a 26-year-old turn a $450,000-a-year garage operation into a $125 million company without losing what made it special in the first place?

Taking Over Too Soon

Vic Edelbrock Jr. was born in 1936, the only son of Vic Edelbrock Sr., a mechanic whose small Los Angeles shop had already built a reputation for high-performance intake manifolds and cylinder heads by the early 1960s. After earning a business degree from USC on a football scholarship, Vic Jr. expected years to ease into the family business, instead, his father’s death from cancer in late 1962 put him in charge at 26, with annual sales sitting at roughly $450,000 and a staff of just ten.

Growing an Industry, Not Just a Company

Rather than simply maintaining what his father built, Edelbrock Jr. spent the next several decades expanding into sanctioned drag racing and short-track motorsports, helping push the company’s annual revenue past $125 million by 2004. He also served as president of the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) from 1971 to 1974 and sat on its board for over two decades, using that platform to help legitimize and organize the performance aftermarket industry as a whole, not just his own company’s slice of it.

A Legacy That Outlasted the Man

Edelbrock Jr. died peacefully on June 9, 2017, at his home in Rolling Hills, California, at the age of 80, following complications from a cold. By the time of his death, the company he’d taken over as an unproven 26-year-old had grown into a fixture of the hot-rodding world, with a reputation for performance parts that outlasted its founder by generations.

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