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.

Big Bertha is the popular, full-figured owner of the community's most successful whorehouse and moonshine racketeering enterprise. Some guys decide to rob Big Bertha’s stash of money, but the local cops just happen to coincidentally be "visiting" the joint. With her money missing, Big Bertha announces the closure of her whorehouse, but nobody in town will let that happen!