I have this decal on my pickup, and I just realized it makes up exactly half of the Edelbrock parts I currently have installed on it. This decal and the air cleaner lid.
As anyone would, I took an inventory of parts I had and parts I needed. With no more Edelbrock, it makes perfect sense to stock up on enough stuff to last me roughly until the time they put me in the ground, right? Being as I don’t use a ton of Edelbrock stuff, I figured I had most of what I needed, less one carburetor and maybe a couple of other small items. Shockingly, everywhere I looked had a stock of, well, everything. There were no clearance prices, shortage gouging, notes of potential delivery or after-sales service issues, nothing. It was almost as if Edelbrock weren’t closing. As a matter of fact, it was exactly like that, because they weren’t. Not entirely, anyway.
As I sit here, still bent that I fell for some plot-full-of-holes, click-bait garbage article that didn’t tell the whole story, I can confidently tell you what I do know, in a matter that hopefully makes sense. Edelbrock, once a family business, was sold out to Industrial Opportunity Partners of Illinois way back in 2010. Basically, they’re a money company, or a private equity firm, focussed on owning businesses such as Edelbrock. Their website shows guys in blue-collared shirts wearing safety glasses and pointing at things on what looks like a production floor, which is better than suits in an office, I suppose, or it’s staged to look that way, at least.
Around a year ago, IOP purchased another aftermarket performance parts company, Comp Cams. From what I can gather, Edelbrock is not closing, but rather just their headquarters. As far as I can tell, they still have two foundry locations in San Jacinto, California, and apparently, they’re hiring at the time I’m writing this. Comp Cams still have their headquarters in Memphis, which would lead me to assume that they’ll just run Edelbrock out of there, meaning IOP removed the Torrence location due to staff redundancy. I hate to see businesses cut staff like this, and it is all-too-common nowadays, but in this case, it makes sense. California is a hard place to run a business, and although it’s hard to relocate something like a foundry, it’s easy to relocate offices. Over the years, Edelbrock has had a struggle or two, as have Comp Cams. I’m always skeptical when a private equity firm buys a business, as the bottom line is generally where their focus is, so we’ll see how this progresses over time. I was assured when Record joined Irwin, it would be business as usual, and it was only in China instead of England. Hopefully, that’s not the case with this, as I’ve grown rather fond of seeing those little red, white, and blue “Made in USA” tags attached to everything.
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