Suunto Race S Review

The Suunto Race S. All photos: iRunFar/Craig Randall

The Suunto Race S ($350) has become closely linked to ultrarunning star Courtney Dauwalter in recent months, thanks to the new “Courtney edition” Suunto Race S Titanium, with its special glow-in-the-dark strap. The Race S comes in two configurations — stainless steel and titanium — but both are offered in Suunto’s 45-millimeter case, its smallest available right now.

In a pre-launch meeting with the media, Dauwalter told us that the Race S’s compact size was one of its biggest features. In 50- or 100-mile or longer races, she has a point: no one wants to wear or carry bulky gear that adds additional fatigue to the body.

This review focuses on the stainless steel version, which weighs just 2.93 ounces (83 grams).

The Race S has been out since the middle of 2024, and at that time it was in rare air; it costs just $350 with the same AMOLED screen as its big brother the Suunto Race, excellent battery performance, and an updated heart rate sensor, making it perhaps the most feature-rich GPS performance watch for the money.

But in the months that followed, Coros released the Coros Pace Pro, also with an AMOLED screen and also $350 — which makes the buying decision process a little trickier. Though this isn’t a head-to-head comparison review of these two watches, it is important to mention that the Pace Pro has stolen some of the Race S’s features-for-the-price-point position. There are still some crucial differences, particularly in material and build quality that might give Suunto the edge for ultrarunners and general outdoor athletes over the admittedly road-and-track oriented Pace Pro.

A super lightweight design and long-lasting battery are normally two opposing forces. The bigger and bulkier the case, the more room there is for a more powerful battery. Suunto Product Manager Markus Kemetter said that through improved battery innovations and removing features, the Suunto Race S has been able to drop weight and size without sacrificing too much on the battery side.

Suunto Race S Battery Performance

A back view of the Suunto Race S.

Slim? Small? Svelte? The Suunto Race S really is all about that “s,” whatever it actually stands for. The weight is slim, the screen is small and, unfortunately, the battery is a little bit on the svelter side too. In these wild times when 200-mile races are becoming normalized, the Suunto Race wowed many runners with its 50 hours of best performance, dual-band GPS recording. The Race S dials down this capacity to 40 hours.

These values on both versions can be almost doubled on the top end by reducing the GPS performance to tour mode; this increases battery performance by reducing the GPS sampling rate and turning off features like the optical heart rate sensor. On the other hand, if you just train most days but in mere-mortal increments you can expect to get a couple of weeks out of the battery between charges.

The world is quickly moving to USB-C as the standard in charging configurations. Somewhat surprisingly, the Race S employs the exact same magnetic charging dock and USB type that models as old as the Suunto 9 Peak uses, with their USB-A standard.

Though the charging dock itself is clumsy and finicky to connect to the watch, the recharging time on the Race S is just as fantastic as some of its predecessor models. In less than 40 minutes, the Race S can be powered to almost 100% from 0, making it the quickest refill in almost any class of GPS performance watches.

And the Race S — like almost all Suuntos of old — can be recharged during an activity; such as at an aid station during an ultramarathon, so you don’t have to end the recording outright. No need to even pause the activity.

The Race S includes sleep and HRV tracking. Many of us enjoy this data to help paint a more well-rounded picture of our training. But again, it will sink your battery as HRV requires all-day and overnight heart rate sensor input.

The bottom line with the Suunto Race S and battery is that it’s good but it’s no Coros. You won’t get so much use from the watch that you’ll misplace where your charging cable is because it’s been so long since you needed it, as is the case with many Coros models. But battery recharging is so fast and the features for the cost are so high with the Race S, that the tradeoff is acceptable.

Suunto Race S AMOLED Display

The Suunto Race S (right) beside the larger Suunto Race.

A description of the Suunto Race S’s battery performance can’t be separated from a discussion on its AMOLED display.

Whereas you can extend the battery performance during activities by reducing sampling rates and turning off biofeedback sensors, you can’t swap the Race S between its standard high-definition AMOLED display and, say, a more practical memory in pixel (MIP) one. While it’d be nice to switch between display types, the reality is that the battery pays a premium for the gorgeous AMOLED display it powers.

Suunto has optimized for the superior visual experience, but you’ll need to spend some quality time with the settings configurations to familiarize yourself with how to take advantage of them.

Raise to wake is the default configuration on the watch, which will detect when you turn your wrist to look at it by going from dim for battery preservation to fully bright. This feature can be shut off or the light turned to always on, depending on your preference.

Raise to wake is fine when just going about your day, but I find it a tad frustrating during activities when, say during an interval workout, you want to see your watch face data immediately. But due to the small lag while the watch wakes up, you wait longer to see the screen than in a MIP display watch. Raise to wake too can be switched off during activities, but expect to use a lot more battery if it’s set to light always on.

AMOLED is criticized for being harder to read in direct sunlight than MIP watches, but the Race S does a fantastic job with readability in any condition, and in darker or cloudy conditions it is just flat-out superior to any other display type.

Suunto Race S Mapping

One of the areas where AMOLED is appreciated most is when you utilize the Suunto Race S’s mapping functions. The Suunto Race S offers comprehensive mapping and navigation features that make it valuable for adventure running or on new routes. The maps still don’t come pre-loaded, but it’s possible to download individual area maps from the Suunto app and then sync them to the watch.

This process though can be frustratingly slow, even for just individual state maps. I spent a lot of time wondering if the download was even happening despite it showing that it was in the app. For example, downloading Colorado and its 1.2 GB of data took almost a full hour to finish, sync, and become usable in the watch.

The watch doesn’t have enough memory to hold it all, but you have to wonder just how long it would take to download the entire United States with its 42 GB size. Since the maps are downloaded, they are available offline, and they include topographic details, elevation lines, trails, and other POI. While not as impressive as the Garmin Fenix 8 AMOLED maps, which come pre-loaded and fully labeled, the Race S offers the same zoom and pan options to explore surrounding areas.

Should You Buy the Suunto Race S?

A side view of the Suunto Race S.

So far in this review, the Suunto Race S has been virtually comparable to the Coros Pace Pro. Both are around $350; both utilize an AMOLED display; neither comes preloaded with maps but are available for download; both are very light compared to traditional high-function GPS sport watches; both utilize adequate but not great optical heart rate sensors.

The two watches diverge significantly in two key areas: material build and processing speed.

Coros, by its own admission, has said that the Pace Pro with its mineral glass display is not recommended for mountain activities. The glass just won’t stand up to impact from rock. The Suunto Race S, on the other hand, uses the incredibly strong Gorilla Glass, which is not only thin and light, but is scratch- and impact-resistant. The Pace Pro may be better suited to road and track running while the Race S is firmly at home on trails where it can withstand the inevitable impact from falling or scrambling.

Coros’s unbelievable battery longevity is beloved only just above its screaming fast processing power. This has never been Suunto’s strength, and remains buoyed to even the newest Suunto products, the Race S included. Whether it is the relative slowness of scrolling the digital crown to the time it takes the watch to save your activity, to the act of transferring the activity to the app and then third-party sites like Strava — Suunto is simply behind the ball compared to Coros.

Then you add less frequent over-the-air software updates and improvements compared to Coros. You’ll likely never break the Race S or say it is less pretty than Coros (and even Garmin), and so the value proposition — with features being more or less equal to the Pace Pro — is reduced to durability, design, and user interface. These are what have and continue to truly set Suunto apart from the competition.

Call for Comments

• Have you tried the Suunto Race S? What were your thoughts?

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