Race Master Sail Timer + Speed 4+

Is there a way to manually add and store waypoints for future races? Our local clubs have placed permanent marks for racing. I have the gps coordinates and looking for a way to add and save marks then be able to hit a go to function after each rounding. Only Garmin seems to have this ability and it’s so complicated every sailor hates it! Thank you for all your work on this. It really offers a lot of great things.

Thank you for your question. I will add a section on this on the info page in the app soon. There are a few options: Race Master understands many variants of the GPX file format and is registered in your phone to support this: you can import a GPX file with marks by tapping on the GPX file and select Race Master.

To manually edit coordinates please use the “Edit Marks” page and after e.g. projecting a mark with 0 distance selecting this mark for editing. You can then tap on the blue coordinates to edit. Remember that you can select GPS Coordinates format under settings in app to your preference before editing.
You can also consider sharing a mark with others in your club by tapping the share button when reviewing a mark under “Edit Marks”. Please reach out over email if you have further questions.

I used this a couple of years ago so I could count down the time for race starts and it worked well and it was free so expectations matched. Just purchased a silver subscription expecting a distance and time to the line. I also expected to be able to drive by Race Committee boat and pin of the line and ping each end but was surprised to find out those functions were not in my subscription. This is potentially a 5 star app if pinging the line, distance and time to line were included. Unfortunately they are not with silver subscription. Please include those functions and it would be a great inexpensive app for every weekly sail boat racer. I would pay for the gold subscription at $2.99 a month but am afraid I won’t get what I need and it will be too late once I’ve already paid. Therefore, I recommend a 7 day free trial so subscribers can test out the functions before fully committing to paying monthly or quarterly. Again, great potential and a large number of boats with antiquated chart plotters need your app. I look forward to seeing it developed fully.

Thank you for your review! I will add a section on this, meanwhile please ensure you have enabled Location for the app in iPhone Settings and please reach out via email.

Stay safe and have fun sailing!

I’ve used the app for timing regatta starts for over a year and was curious about using the other features so upgraded to Gold for a few months and about a dozen races this summer. Unfortunately I found the other features glitchy and unintuitive.

For example, if you keep the timer visible to monitor SOG and COG the other features are buried on a separate menu page making it a clumsy process to get to while racing; potentially useful stuff like wind shift and Live Map are hard to read and sometimes don’t show up.

There’s no real description or information on a lot of the features or how to use them. For example what is the difference between the Compass feature and the Smart View? And why can’t I use True North instead of magnetic?

Dropping marks is also a challenge, the Race History sometimes works sometime not. The Stop Racing process is a joke as is the always on location tracking. Yes I know I can use Siri to do it. But I don’t want to.

Honestly, it’s a great feature set, and I tried hard to use the upgraded Gold features but I feel that they were dumped into the app and not rigorously tested on the water in actual regattas.

I’m giving Race Master 3 stars since the Timer function is very good and I plan to keep using it, but I cancelled the Gold subscription and cannot currently recommend it.

Thank you for a thoughtful review. The SmartView is intended as a start at trying to address one of the challenges you highlight; it will automatically change view depending on if you are pre-start or not. Under Settings in the app there is a possibility to change the setting for “Magnetic Heading” (when disabled, COG is relative to true north). I’ll keep refining the app, maybe someday it may work better for your needs. ⛵️