Steelfire

The racetrack plan is not a styling detail. It's a literal invitation to gather, and once you commit to it three harder problems follow.

It costs surface area. A rounded plan gives up the corners a rectangle keeps, and cook surface is how this category is compared. So the area got tested for what it was actually for: food printed at average size on paper, laid out on mockups the way a person really loads a griddle. Eggs here, bacon along the edge, burgers in the middle. That showed how much area was usable rather than how much was advertised, and where it could be given up without anyone noticing.

It complicates the lid. A rounded perimeter is a harder sealing and locating problem than four straight edges, and most of the detail work went there.

And it forces a custom burner. Off-the-shelf burners are built for rectangles. That turned out to be the useful constraint rather than the expensive one, because the multi-ply stainless cook surface needed even heat across the whole plate, and designing the burner to the shape was how you get there without hot spots.

Setup, cleaning, movement and storage all improved alongside it. A stainless cook surface at a price point where everything else stainless sits significantly higher. Category first. It went on to win the 2026 Core77 Design Award in Sports and Outdoors.