Hauler High-Country

Bud Preuss Doing It His Way

- Brian Losness

BUD PREUSS IS A SELF-MADE MAN. After graduating from Bellflower, California’s Garr High School, where he studied under none other than drag racing’s most famous educator, Gary Densham, he relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado.

When a promised construction job in Colorado failed to materialize, Preuss had a skill set to fall back on. “In high school I was striping and lettering people’s trucks and stuff on the side. I brought to Junction a California flair that nobody else had seen or done.” His creativity would pay huge dividends for Preuss and his family.

In the fall of 1980, Bud’s Signs opened its doors. “I started with me and that was it for a while,” Preuss says. Now he has 25 employees and an 18,000-sq-ft state-of-the-art shop that does all facets of the sign business.

When he was first starting out, he thought it would be fun to get a race car. Then children came, and Preuss focused on them. His oldest, Brett, fell in love with motocross, “So I focused my racing energies on his racing.”