Every year the race has a theme. The 2027 poster says TRUE COLORS.
We could have built almost anything. But the moment we saw that theme, one Baltimore thing jumped out: the blue crab. A blue crab is blue when it's alive, and it turns orange when you steam it. A crab literally shows its true colours in the pot. The theme and the crab were the same idea.
The name#
In Chesapeake talk, a sook is a grown-up female blue crab. You can tell a sook by the red tips on her claws, like painted nails. Watermen sort crabs into sooks and jimmies (the males) all day long.
So our crab is a lady, and her name is SOOK.
Who named her? Claude and I did, in my very first planning session. I asked for a plan for a winning machine, and the plan came back with a crab called "Sook". It stuck straight away.
That first plan also listed a few runner-ups. I'd honestly forgotten them, so I went back and looked:
- Steamed!
- True Blue (Until Steamed)
- Old Bay Bertha
- Jimmy's True Colors
That last one is extra funny if you read episode 1: a "jimmy" is a male crab, and that also happens to be our chief builder's name. He'll have to settle for building her.
One more confession from that first plan: it said a crab "turns red" when you steam it. We fixed that later (see below).
Why a crab works as a race machine#
It isn't only about looks. A crab is a great shape for this race:
- She's wide and low-slung, which suits a machine that has to stay upright on hills and in sand.
- She lives on land and in water. Our race has both.
- She moves sideways, waves her claws, and has a shell that can change colour. That's a whole show built in.
The show: three acts#
Our art lead shaped SOOK's race day into a three-act show, and the colours tell the story:
- Act I: Blue. She rolls out of the start as a living Chesapeake blue crab: cobalt shell, white belly, red-tipped claws.
- Act II: Steamed. At the Canton splashdown, she hits the water and "cooks". Her shell turns orange, like a crab out of the steamer. (Orange, not red: a steamed crab really is more orange than red. We checked a lot of crabs. For research.)
- Act III: True colors. For the finish, every panel flips to rainbow.
How exactly the shell flips is still being worked out, and that's a story for a later episode.
A small rule we're proud of#
Any flashing lights on SOOK are orange, white or cyan, never red and blue. Flashing red and blue looks like a police car, and nobody wants a giant crab pulled over on race day.
What's next#
Next time: drawing her. How a few sentences turned into the picture we're building from, and the version we threw away.
Josh
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