Dan Murphy and Joe Fitzpatrick build race cars. Drag cars specifically, the whole tube-framed panoply of quarter-mile missiles, from Top Fuelers to Funny Cars to some very fast door cars. They left Don Schumacher Racing (DSR) in the winter of 2021–2022 and established Precision Built Race Cars (PBRC) so they could focus on what they do best—fabrication—while expanding their race car repertoire. "Anything that anybody wants us to build for them," said Fitzpatrick, "if we can do it at the highest level, we would be interested."

To date, they've built 22 chassis. Most have been Funny Cars and Fuel dragsters, as they built at DSR, "but at the end of the day, there's only going to be 20 or 30 of them, total," said Murphy. They completed their first doorslammer, a 1969 Camaro for Outlaw 632, in June 2025, and were finishing their first Pro Modified when we spoke in early October. Fitted with a carbon-fiber, current-model Camaro body from Five Star, the Pro Mod was crafted for Brownsburg local Jeff Rudolf to run in PDRA and the Mid-West Drag Racing Series. "We fitted everything out except the wiring," said Murphy, "top to bottom, front to back, literally as turnkey as you can get."

THE BIG MOVE

For both Fitzpatrick and Murphy, speed has been a lifelong pursuit. Indiana native Fitzpatrick was "captivated" by his family's annual excursion to the US Nationals, supporting an uncle who campaigned an Alcohol Funny Car. Murphy raced dirt bikes and four-wheelers in New York and "developed a love for cars and anything that went fast and made a lot of noise."

Both attended out-of-state technical colleges, hoping to make a career in motorsports. Nearing graduation from WyoTech in Laramie, Wyoming, Fitzpatrick sent resumes to race teams, "and fortunately, I got a call from Mike Neff. It was right after he'd won the 2005 championship with Gary Scelzi. I stopped by Schumacher's and kind of superfanned on him, and it must have stuck because he called me for a job a week or two later."

That same year, Murphy was recruited by DSR from the University of Northwestern Ohio. "I interviewed with Eddie 'Ace' McCulloch on Friday and started work on Monday."

Initially, both men traveled with race teams, but Fitzpatrick soon settled into a new role as manager of the DSR fab shop. Several years later, when Murphy was "ready to get off the road," it so happened that the fab shop had an opening.

It was a comfortable fit—until it wasn't. "We were building Funny Cars and dragsters," said Murphy, "and we wanted to build any and all race cars. That wasn't the direction they wanted to take."

"The landscape was changing," said Fitzpatrick, "and I didn't want to get into manufacturing things that I couldn't be personally invested in."

They rented shop space just minutes away from DSR in Brownsburg, "just four bare walls," as Fitzpatrick described it.

"We had to do everything from lights to air lines to sub panels," said Murphy. Friends and family helped move "mills, lathes, band saws, and tables," sometimes providing temporary storage in their homes.

"Every weekend, from kids to wives to parents," added Fitzpatrick. Then, "it was just the two of us for the first year. We worked around the clock, seven days a week." But the decision to leave DSR had not been made lightly. "We weren't just sitting around one day, and, like, 'You know what, let's do our own thing.' We were encouraged by several people in Top Fuel racing to start our own shop."

One of those people was Mike Knudsen, now crew chief on Matt Hagan's Funny Car. He crewed for Gary Scelzi with Fitzpatrick all those years ago. "We thought they would be successful opening their own shop," he recalled, "[but] it's a scary thing, owning your own business. So it took a little convincing that the business would be there once they left DSR."

Tony Stewart Racing (TSR), which owns the Hagan team, offered Fitzpatrick and Murphy "a verbal contract. You are going to have these chassis to build. You are going to have these bodies to mount. We can guarantee you that amount of work to get you started," continued Knudsen. Since then, TSR has purchased two new dragsters and one new Funny Car from PBRC, plus "multiple front halves for the Funny Car, and at least a couple of front halves and back halves on the dragster side."

Knudsen particularly appreciates the "engineering mindset" that Fitzpatrick and Murphy bring to their work. "Every time we change a design, they ask, 'Why do you think this is better?' So we have a round-table discussion where we get everyone's ideas, and we go out on the track and see if it works. Seventy percent of the time they are right."

To read the full article, plus hundreds of other articles like it, for free, sign up for a digital subscription to PRI Magazine on Zinio here.   

Once you download the Zinio mobile app or are logged into Zinio on a desktop browser, you will gain immediate access to more than a year's worth of content, including "PRI Member Profile: Precision Built Race Cars" here and additional coverage in the January/February 2026 issue here.