Free Lap Timer Apps: What the Free Tier Gets You, and How Accurate Phone GPS Is

The short answer

• Accuracy: a phone gets one GPS position a second. Done well, timing from that is good to around a tenth of a second, which is plenty for comparing your own laps through a day.
• Free tiers: they rarely remove the lap timer itself. They limit what comes after: exports, overlays, history or circuits.
• PinIt Cam: everything is free, including lap timing and video with the lap timer on it. The one limit is exporting from five sessions a month. Pro is a one-time purchase that removes it.

How a phone times a lap

An iPhone reports its position about once a second. At 100 mph that is a fix every 44 metres, so the phone almost never has a position exactly on the start/finish line. How an app deals with that gap decides how good its lap times are.

The crude way is a circle. Draw a circle round the start/finish line and start a new lap when a GPS fix lands inside it. With fixes 40-odd metres apart, a fast car can jump straight over a small circle and the lap is missed. When it does trigger, the trigger point moves with your line, so each “lap” is measured between two slightly different places.

PinIt Cam uses a line. Each supported circuit has a timing line across the track at its start/finish. Instead of asking “is this fix near the line?”, the app asks “did the path between the last two fixes cross it?” That can’t miss at any speed. It then works out where along that path the crossing happened, and so when. In our analysis that takes the timing error from around three tenths to roughly one tenth of a second.

A few details stop false laps:

• The line has a direction. A crossing the wrong way doesn’t count.
• The pit side is trimmed, so driving down the pit lane doesn’t start a lap.
• Crawling doesn’t count. Crossings below 20 km/h are ignored, so rolling about in the paddock won’t log laps.

When phone timing is good enough, and when it isn’t

Good enough: seeing your lap times through the day, spotting which session was quickest, and having the time on the footage of the lap that produced it. That is what most track day drivers want.

Not the official time: where an organiser runs transponder timing, that is the reference. Use your phone for your own progress, not for settling bets to the hundredth.

Not for corner-by-corner analysis: a fix every second doesn’t give you precise braking points or sector splits. Dedicated data loggers sample many times a second for exactly that reason.

Marginal on very short tracks: on a kart track with corners a couple of seconds apart, one fix a second is thin. PinIt Cam doesn’t cover kart tracks; it’s built for full circuits.

What free lap timer apps usually limit

Before you rely on a free app for a season, check these:

• Exports. Can you get the video and times off the phone, how often, and at what quality?
• Watermarks. Is there a mark on exported video, and how big is it?
• Overlays. Are lap times and speed burned into the video for free, or only in a paid version?
• Circuits. Are circuits built in, or do you download or draw each one?
• History. Are old sessions kept, or capped?
• Subscription or one-off. For a handful of track days a year, a subscription you pay all winter adds up.

PinIt Cam’s free tier, exactly

Free, with no cap: recording with both cameras at once, automatic lap timing at 107 built-in circuits in 22 countries, the live track map and corner names, GPS speed and G-force, highlight detection and reels, Paddock Mode with your friends, every export layout, and your own logo on exports.

The one limit: you can export from five sessions each calendar month. Record and watch as much as you like; the limit is only on exporting. Pro removes it with a one-time purchase, with no subscription, and changes nothing else.

Being straight about the mark: every export carries a small “PINIT CAM” mark, on the free version and Pro alike. Paying doesn’t remove it, so nobody is pushed to upgrade to lose it.

Lap times on the video: a full session export shows the lap timer. Highlight reels leave it out, because a running clock jumping between cuts looks broken.

Two drivers in their App Store reviews:

• “Brilliant app to record on board track days, much easier than having to mount two go pros!”
• “automatic highlights and exports really help and save time.”

What PinIt Cam doesn’t do

• No Android version. It’s iPhone only, XS or later.
• No external GPS. Timing uses the iPhone’s own GPS.
• Built-in circuits only. Lap timing works at the 107 circuits in the app. You can’t draw your own line, so kart tracks, motocross and unlisted venues aren’t timed. You can still record there, and you can ask for a circuit to be added.
• No sector times. Corners are named on your footage, but timing is per lap.