In 1958, two teenagers take their pride and joy, a hopped-up Chevy, and start a cross-country journey to enter it in the National Championship drag races in California. Along the way they hook up with a pretty but dingy waitress who quits her job and hops in their car--and turns out to be more trouble than they thought--drag-race a gang of town punks who lose to to them and then accuse them of cheating, and come up against a local cop who is obsessed with putting these two "juvenile delinquents" in jail.