• • • JIM HALSEY • • • BRANDON SWITZER • • •
Competition Engines , which he ’ s proudly continued to support . By qualifying No . 1 at four of the six PDRA races , Halsey handily clinched the 2020 Nitrous Wars engine builders championship for Fulton .
“ It ’ s cool . Gene ’ s been around forever ,” Halsey says . “ I ’ ve been a customer of his for close to 20 years , if not right at 20 years . A lot of people had him written off . I guess we ’ re showing the old man ’ s still got it .”
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Brandon Switzer ’ s fascination
with nitrous oxide , and specifically its use as a power adder in drag racing , started when he was in high school . He was working at Steeda Autosports , an aftermarket manufacturer of Ford performance parts , and he started to believe there was tons of room for improvement in the nitrous world .
“ Everybody had Vortechs or turbos or whatever , but then there was a couple of guys that had nitrous ,” Switzer says , pointing out that this was around 30 years ago . “ I was seeing everybody put nitrous on their engines and tear stuff up . Nitrous got a bad rap . I guess I became interested in working on the problem .”
Switzer ’ s interest in solving problems was a trait he picked up from his father , who solved problems in the medical industry doing R & D work on blood cell analyzers .
“ Everything I learned , I learned from my parents ,” Switzer says . “ My mom taught me discipline and my dad taught me probably the
AS A LONGTIME NITROUS PRO MOD RACER , HALSEY KNOWS HIS WAY AROUND A PRO NITROUS CAR . HE ADMITS IT WASN ’ T EASY TO BRING IN AN OUTSIDE TUNER , BUT WOULDN ’ T HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY NOW . most important thing , which was how to solve problems systematically and how to evaluate a system and its complexity and variables .”
After high school , Switzer used the money his parents had set aside for college to launch his own performance shop , where he worked on a wide variety of projects . Around two years into the venture he started to specialize in nitrous systems and intake manifolds , which led to some collaborative work with Wilson Manifolds . He then sold some of his equipment to Wilson and went to work at the company .
In addition to building his business , Switzer raced competitively in the NMRA and Fun Ford series in a line of nitrous-fed Fords . He tuned his own car and was eventually called on to tune cars for Wilson ’ s customers . Towards the end of his five years at Wilson Manifolds , he was being flown to races to work with Pro Mod drivers Mike Castellana and Shannon Jenkins on their nitrous programs . That led to the formation of Speedtech Nitrous , which Switzer operated with Castellana and Jenkins until late 2011 .
Switzer branched out and launched Switzer Dynamics in the spring of 2012 . Located in Denver , North Carolina , a small town on the west side of Lake Norman , Switzer Dynamics is Switzer ’ s vision realized . With cutting-edge machines from DMG Mori and Haas Automation filling up 10,000 square feet of the 15,000-square-foot shop , it was a significant task to get it going .
“ It was a big financial undertaking and a lot of stress to open a shop of this size with the limited amount of money that I had and the amount I had to borrow ,” Switzer admits . “ So that was stressful . It wasn ’ t necessarily challenging . I didn ’ t really have to overcome a lot of obstacles to make all of that happen . By the time I opened
HALSEY ’ S 2021 SEASON IS ALREADY OFF TO A STRONG START , AS HE WON THE OUTLAW PRO MOD CLASS AT THE U . S . STREET NATIONALS AT BRADENTON IN LATE JANUARY .
this place , I already had 20 years ’ experience of running this kind of business , so the technical side of the business wasn ’ t really the hard part .”
The company has maintained consistent growth over the last nine years , even with Switzer spending the better part of 15-20 weekends a year at tracks around the country working with tuning customers . He ’ s able to get away from the shop mainly because of the small , tight-knit group of employees he has manning the machines and assembling products .
“ I couldn ’ t be at the racetrack or doing the outside-of-the-shop activities if I didn ’ t have the best possible group of people here supporting me ,” Switzer says . “ I ’ ve put the right people that are very good by their own in place here and I spent a lot of time training them .”
Switzer is joined by his wife , Melissa , who works at the shop and travels to nearly all of the races with Brandon . The rest of the Switzer Dynamics team is made up of just three other people : Dan Carver , who handles sales , tech and installations ; Darrell Lail , the manual machinist , welder and fabricator ; and Hunter Devers , a machinist .
“ Most people would be surprised at the amount of equipment , the level of what we do , and the amount of work that we do with the amount of people that we have ,” Switzer says . “ Most shops half our size have four times the number of employees . Instead of having five guys running one machine , we might have five machines that are set up correctly and one guy running them .”
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