Does the GoPro Hero 13 have GPS, and is it good enough for lap timing?

Short answer: yes. The GoPro Hero 13 Black has GPS, and it's good enough to time your laps.

That's worth saying plainly, because the previous model muddied the water. GoPro quietly pulled GPS out of the Hero 12 to squeeze out more battery life. Racers who upgraded got a nasty surprise when their telemetry stopped working. The Hero 13 puts GPS back where it belongs.

What GPS the Hero 13 actually has

The Hero 13 uses the same GPS receiver as the Hero 11, a u-blox chip that can pull from several satellite systems at once. It records your position roughly ten times a second and writes it straight into the video file alongside the footage. Position, altitude and speed, all of it, no separate device required.

That 10Hz rate matters. It's the number of position readings per second, and it's what lets software reconstruct the shape of a corner rather than a scatter of dots. Ten a second is enough for lap times, sector splits and a clean racing line on a kart track or a club circuit.

How it compares to older Heros

The Hero 9 launched with shaky GPS that firmware later fixed. The Hero 10 actually dropped from 18Hz to 10Hz in an update, which sounds like a downgrade but let the chip read more satellites at once for a steadier lock. The Hero 11 brought a new chip and a richer data stream, and the Hero 13 carries that forward. So if you're hunting for a used Hero for telemetry, the 11 and 13 are the safe picks. The 12 is the one to skip.

Is 10Hz good enough to race with?

For most of us, yes. A dedicated motorsport logger might run at 25Hz and wire into the kart's sensors, and the GoPro won't match that for outright resolution. But for the job most drivers need, where am I losing time and what's my line doing, 10Hz GPS is plenty. The bigger factors are mounting the camera so it can see the sky and switching GPS on before you film.

Turning Hero 13 GPS into lap times

The camera records the data. It won't show you the lap times on its own. Upload the footage to Race Ninja and it reads the GPS out of the file, detects each lap, splits it into sectors and draws your racing line. You also get lap-versus-lap comparisons and AI coaching on the corners costing you the most, all from the Hero 13 you already bought, with no extra box on the kart.

So the Hero 13 is a genuinely strong camera for telemetry again. Just remember the rule the spec sheet won't tell you. Turn GPS on, get a solid lock, then record.