One o'clock in the morning on Mulholland Drive. No streetlights, no guardrails, half a mile of empty asphalt running the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains — and two eighteen-year-olds with a score to settle.

Malcolm Post built his Challenger over two years of Saturday afternoons in a two-bay garage off Reseda Boulevard. Six hundred forty horsepower at the wheels. Diego Merkovich keyed it hood to quarter panel, and everyone knows it, and knowing isn't proving. So they're going to settle it the old way: your car and mine, name the night. Twenty-four people have come up the hill to watch.

None of them pay much attention to the kid on the race crew who can't stop sweating. The one who coughs something dark across the hood of a parked Acura.

The Drag Race is a story about a kid who spent two years building the perfect machine and one night learning what it costs to walk away from it. It's about grudges that stop mattering, a neighbor who comes out in his bathrobe to give a speech he'll never finish, and it's about who you can save when the road home is half a mile of darkness... And who you can't.

Told at street level, from behind the wheel of an American muscle car — no room for error, and no one coming to help.

The cops will call it a street race gone bad.

The cops have no idea.