After recently re-watching Grease (1978) I noticed a lot of points of similarity.

The Thunder Road race parallels the pod race for example but that seems to be nailed down to add any lines or references.

But it might be fun to merge some of the pod construction sequences including the deleted scenes with into musical montage to a truncated version of Greased Lightning.

The film pretty much dominated the cinema and charts around the same time as Star Wars and probably wouldn't have been possible without American Graffiti.