All in the Family; We drive a car from the garage of the First Family of Fast.(News)(Edelbrock Corp. profile and Total Performance Package evaulation)(Company Profile)(Product/Service Evaluation)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Edelbrock Corp. today is an $81 million giant in the performance aftermarket. It has eight facilities and more than 400,000 square feet of production, sales and R&D space in Southern California, the birthplace of hot rodding. Edelbrock designs, tests, builds and sells some 6400 different performance parts through a network of more than 13,000 retail outlets-everything from intake manifolds and cat-back exhausts to cylinder heads, shock absorbers and water pumps, all of which go on muscle cars across the country and around the world.

But that's the business side of it. The story of Edelbrock, The Aftermarket Giant, begins more simply, with the story of Edelbrock, The Father and Son. It began when Vic Edelbrock Sr. opened an automotive repair shop on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, in 1933.

Soon after, Edelbrock cars were racing on the circle tracks and dry lakes of Southern California, during the golden age of hot rodding. In 1938 Vic Sr. bought a '32 Ford and used it to test new speed parts, more or less inventing the marketing tool that would later be known as ``the project car.'' The first big seller from an Edelbrock project car was the Slingshot manifold, used by Vic Sr. on the dry lakes to clock a pre-war time of 121.42 mph in the '32.

Business wasn't the only thing growing for the Edelbrock name. Vic Jr. was born in 1936 and started working summers in his dad's shop at age 12.

``I was making two dollars a day and I thought I was really living,'' he said.

He went to USC on a football scholarship, graduated with a degree in business in 1959 and went to work full time for his dad's business. Just three years later, he faced a challenge no business school could have prepared him for when Vic Sr. was diagnosed with inoperable cancer.