09/03/2026
Every engine on this page has a camshaft. Every Hemi, every Cammer, every small-block, every big-block, every Duramax, every Cummins — every one of them breathes through a component whose profile was shaped by principles that Ed Iskenderian helped establish in a small shop in Culver City, California, in 1946. The camshaft is the engine's personality: it determines when the valves open, how long they stay open, how far they open, and how aggressively they close. Change the cam and you change everything — the idle quality, the power curve, the RPM range, the exhaust note, the drivability. Every performance engine builder on this page — Jon Kaase, Smokey Yunick, Waddell Wilson, Lamer Walden, Chris Komarony — selected a camshaft as one of the first decisions in their build. Ed Iskenderian spent eighty years making sure the cam they selected existed.
Iskenderian was born July 10, 1921, in Cutler, California — Tulare County, grapevine country — to first-generation Armenian immigrant parents. Frost killed the family's grape crop and forced a move to Los Angeles when Ed was a year old. As a teenager during the Depression, he noticed guys driving stripped-down Model Ts around LA — not hot rods yet, just "gow jobs" — and followed them on his bicycle. His first job was repairing vacuum tube radios. He built his first car as a teenager and raced it on the dry lake beds surrounding Los Angeles at speeds exceeding 120 mph. He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, flying supply missions in the Pacific Theater with the Air Transport Command. When he came home in 1946, he founded Isky Racing Cams with a single cam-grinding machine he designed and built himself — because he couldn't get the camshaft he wanted from Ed Winfield, who was too backlogged to fill orders. Winfield — the pioneer of performance camshaft design — told Iskenderian he could tell from his questions that he was going to be big in the camshaft business. Then he showed the young man how to build a grinding machine. The mentor armed the competitor who would eventually surpass him.
Iskenderian understood marketing before marketing was a discipline. A small ad in the second issue of Hot Rod Magazine started the inquiries — many from Southern bootleggers who needed faster cars for the same reason hot rodders did. He traded advertising blows with rival cam manufacturers — especially Jack Engle and later Howards Cams — with clever copy and hilarious Pete Millar-drawn cartoons that turned camshaft ads into entertainment. Having "Isky Cams" lettered on your race car became a status symbol in the 1950s. Don Garlits ran the Isky "5 Cycle" cam. Big John Mazmanian ran Isky in the A/Gas Supercharged wars. Mickey Thompson ran Isky at Bonneville when he hit 406 mph. Garlits built a shrine to Iskenderian inside his Museum of Drag Racing. The man who ground cams in a Culver City shop earned a shrine in the museum of the greatest drag racer who ever lived. That's the respect the Camfather commanded.
The industry-building contribution that outlasts even the camshafts: in 1963, Iskenderian co-founded the Speed Equipment Manufacturers Association — SEMA — and served as its first president. Before SEMA, the aftermarket performance industry was a collection of individual shops and small manufacturers with no national organization, no unified voice, and no political representation. Iskenderian helped unite them — giving racers, builders, and manufacturers a national stage that eventually grew into the most powerful trade organization in the American automotive aftermarket. Every SEMA Show in Las Vegas, every aftermarket catalog, every performance parts retailer that exists today operates within the framework that Iskenderian helped create in 1963. The Camfather didn't just build camshafts. He built the industry that sells them.
Iskenderian was the first to build an engine making one horsepower per cubic inch on pump gasoline — in a postwar Dodge Hemi, years before Chevrolet's fuel-injected 283 reached that milestone in 1957. He was the first to offer complete valvetrain component sets — cam, lifters, springs, retainers, locks — as matched packages rather than individual parts. He pioneered the use of computer-aided design in camshaft profile development. He innovated high-performance camshaft profiles that became the templates every subsequent cam manufacturer followed. The "Isky 505" and "5 Cycle" cam profiles became legendary designations that racers ordered by name the way musicians request songs.
Even past his hundredth birthday in 2021, Iskenderian remained a presence at motorsport gatherings that defied biology. Warren Johnson — the Professor of Pro Stock — chatted with him at the 2020 Winternationals. Jack Beckman and Tim Wilkerson hung with him at the 2023 Night of Champions. John Force sought him out. At the 2024 NHRA Finals in Pomona, Iskenderian — 103 years old — took a lap down the return road and the fans roared. He sent autographed photos to admirers with a simple inscription: "From one hot rodder to another." Thousands of them. Over decades.
Ed Iskenderian died February 4, 2026, in Torrance, California. He was 104 years old. His passage was peaceful — which, as RacingJunk noted, is an anomaly for a man whose entire lifespan was built on noise, vibration, and harshness. A teenager on a bicycle following gow jobs through Depression-era Los Angeles. A veteran who came home and built a cam grinding machine. The first president of SEMA. A man still showing up at racetracks at 103. Ed Iskenderian lived the entire history of American hot rodding — from the dry lakes to the digital age — and shaped more of it than almost anyone who ever lived. Every camshaft in every engine on this page exists in a world the Camfather helped build.
