For young Raf, who lives in a shabby suburb of London with his unemployed and permanently drunk father Mario, motorbike riding is everything. Raf uses every free minute he gets to tinker with his bike - a prototype he wants to win the world championship with one day! And Raf is quite convinced that he will. His best friend Ruben is crazy about bikes too, but he lacks Raf's obsession with them - possibly because fate seems to have been kinder to Ruben. He comes from a reasonably well-to-do background, and also has the prettiest girl in the gang as his girlfriend - Savannah, with whom Raf is secretly in love. While Mario does his best to get his son Raf to forget about bike riding and technical school so he can earn enough money for both of them with a full-time job, and even resorts to violence to get his own way, Ruben's father Tommy employs subtler means to turn his son into a respectable adult: he gives Ruben a smart sports car as a present.