With its good looks and cheaper price tag, the Suunto Race 2 is getting closer to competing with the big-hitting Forerunner 970.
Men’s Fitness verdict
This is Suunto’s best sports watch for a while, with excellent battery life for a killer bright AMOLED, solid accuracy and a strong suite of training insights. If only it had offline music…- Great max-accuracy GPS battery life
- Bigger, brighter display
- Dual frequency GPS, offline maps and routing
- Lacks smartwatch smarts
- No offline music
- Complicated training insights
It’s fair to say Suunto spent a few years misfiring. Its sports watches struggled to match the innovation of Garmin, or the affordable staying power and reliability of newcomer COROS. Then came the Suunto Race and the Suunto Race S – two watches that put the brand firmly back among the best fitness watches. Now the new Suunto Race 2 is another step on the route to redemption.
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The Suunto Race 2’s hero updates over the original Suunto Race are mainly about hardware, with a bigger, brighter display, better GPS battery life, faster processing and a new optical heart rate sensor aiming to flush out some accuracy gremlins. But there’s a smattering of feature updates, too, which should trickle down to its older stablemates.
The Suunto Race 2 comes in one 49mm case size and two flavors. I tested the more wallet-friendly stainless steel model at $499 / £429. But there’s a $100 / £100 pricier (and lighter) titanium at $599 / £529. Both are notably cheaper than the Garmin Forerunner 970 ($749 / £629).
It packs a 1.5-inch sapphire crystal protected AMOLED touchscreen. That’s geek speak for a big, vibrant, sharp colour display with extra scratch resistance. It kicks out 2,000 nits – that’s Apple Watch Series 11 bright – and was easy to read in all lights.
You master your Race 2 via a combination of the touchscreen, three-button controls and a digital crown which scrolls and acts as another button. It’s all nicely responsive and happily snappy. Though the less-intuitive Suunto user interface still takes some learning.
Suunto Race battery life
The Suunto Race 2 battery life is impressive for a bigger AMOLED. On paper, it claims up to 18 days in smartwatch mode; an impressive 55 hours in max accuracy all systems dual frequency GPS mode, 65 hours in all systems GPS and a whopping 200 hours in power saving mode.
The charging dock is vastly improved, too. Unlike predecessor pucks where the watch easily slipped off some sloppy magnets, the Race 2 locks in place. The braided cable is also a nice durability touch.
When it comes to personalization, there’s some customisation of the watch face and you can choose which widgets you pin (from a limited list) for quick access but you can’t quite make this watch your own the way you can with the latest Garmins.
Other key details: you get 32GB of offline map storage and the Race 2 is water rated to 100m.
Oh, and the majority of the tracking and training firepower is also on the Suunto Race, so there’s no need to upgrade unless you really want the boosted battery, bigger screen, improved optical and other hardware upgrades. If you’re a first-time buyer, it’s worth paying the extra for those.
The Suunto Race 2 packs more than 100 sport modes with running, cycling, swimming and triathlon well covered. The suite of training, recovery, health and daily activity tools is fairly comprehensive. Not quite as broad and deep as you’ll find on Garmin but more than enough for most.
Suunto Race 2 features
Runners get all the important mid-run readouts along with some handy extras like running power and a ‘ghost runner’ pacer to keep you on target. Swimmers can record indoor and outdoor with auto lapping for the pool, heart rate from the wrist and SWOLF swim stroke efficiency scores. Cyclists get all the mid-ride essentials and can link in pods and power metres. There’s also multisport mode for easy transitions for the swim-bike-runners.
Suunto training insights are plentiful with things like training effect, training load handily broken down by sport, along with recovery time estimates, lactate threshold estimates and V02 max fitness benchmarking.
However, these are all based on Training Peaks (buy now) and it’s significantly more acronym heavy – and harder to decipher – than Garmin and Polar rivals. Suunto could do with making this a bit easier to penetrate.
Maps and navigation
The Suunto Race 2 navigation smarts are also comprehensive with offline colour maps, route planning via Komoot, Strava, or Suunto’s own app. Those routes include elevation profiles, off-course alerts (though it won’t re-route you if you veer far off course, it’ll only help you retrace your step) and things like estimate time of arrival based on what lies up ahead.
Beyond workouts, there’s the usual suspects: activity tracking, sleep tracking with heart rate variability and blood oxygen levels. Plus a daily resource levels readout – a spin on Garmin’s Body Battery that estimates how much juice you (not your watch) has to handle whatever comes next.
When it comes to smartwatch smarts, it’s all rather basic. No rival for an Apple Watch or the top-tier Garmins like the Forerunner 970. You can read but not respond to smartphone notifications – complete with emojis and get weather updates. But music is limited to controls for a connected smartphone. There’s no offline Spotify. You don’t get any of the mic/speaker and voice tools of the Garmin Forerunner or contactless payments either.
Suunto Race 2 performance
The Suunto Race 2 looks great. It’s well built and robust, if a little on the heavy side compared to the 20g lighter Forerunner 970 but in my training, I found it easy to wear 24-7 thanks to the thinner casing. Though I’m not a huge fan of the pin-strap fastening that made it harder to adjust the fit. Give me a nylon band any day.
When it comes to accuracy, I put the Suunto Race 2 up against the Garmin Forerunner 970 and the HRM600 chest strap to test the optical sensors and the GPS.
While the heart rate performance is improved over the Suunto Race, I still had runs and rides where the Race 2 glitched badly. It’s fine once it settles but really struggled with stops and restarts.
On GPS, I found it matched the Garmin Forerunner 970 and the top-tier Garmin Fenix 8 Pro on distances. If you dig into the tracks in detail, the Suunto largely matches the Forerunner 970 but suffers the odd wobble. But then so does the 970. And ultimately in practice it’s questionable if you’d even notice.
Battery life was excellent. In my tests the overnight burn was around 2-3%. That’s among the most frugal. Meanwhile a 3-hr run in max accuracy GPS burned 6%. That’s a burn rate of just short of 2% per hour. For comparison the Garmin Forerunner 970 was closer to 3% per hour. So, you should get around 55 hours GPS tracking on a single charge.
I’d estimate around 10 days general usage with around 8 hours GPS and heart rate workouts thrown in.
Suunto Race 2 technical specs
| Display | 1.5-inch LTPO AMOLED |
| Display Resolution | 466px x 466px |
| Display Size | 49 x 49 x 12.5mm |
| Connectivity | Bluetooth, WiFi |
| Weight | 76g |
