Isky Racing Cams, one of the first performance camshaft companies, is still going today. We were lucky to have spent time with its effervescent founder, and now, by streaming this documentary, so can you.

There’s a scene in Cheyanne Kane's new documentary Isky where the titular character, Ed “Isky” Iskenderian, is searching through the trunk of an old Cadillac for some cassette tapes he’s sure he recorded and put there some 40 years previous. He finds them, and you can sense not just his joy, but the excitement of the film crew as he inserts one into a tape deck and the voice of Ed Winfield, Isky’s mentor and one of the first performance cam-grinders of the automotive age, crackles into life, talking in depth on the importance of quench in a cylinder chamber.

It’s a pretty amazing moment, the voice of someone who was born in 1901, at the dawn of the car, passing down his knowledge to someone who at the time of the recording, was still pretty young, but at the time of the listening was nearly 100, and at the time of our watching, 102.

Someday, someone is going to feel the same way about this documentary. Kane doesn’t just tell Isky’s story, which would rob the audience of the experience. Instead, she follows Isky and lets him tell stories: some about himself, some about Winfield, about famous racers and builders he worked with. In the end, it’s the story of American hot rodding. The shots of Isky and his shop are intimate and loving.

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