As a kid, I had this racing wheel for the Sega Dreamcast. You plugged it in and you were away, careening down hills in Crazy Taxi. Pedals on the back of the wheel represented the brake and accelerator. Start and stop. It was a simple time.
These days, it’s not so simple. I’ve been trying out the T248 Wheel from Thrustmaster, which is an entry-level wheel that’s presumably for people who don’t want an entire cockpit in their living room. The thing is, you probably still need an entire cockpit in your living room.
It comes with a wheel, a base to attach it to a table, and foot pedals. Let’s start with that first bit. Once you’ve got the wheel, you can’t just plonk it down on a flat surface and start driving. Force feedback allows you to feel like you’re fighting against a real car, but it’s also a good way to make your steering wheel somersault off a coffee table. Don’t ask me how I know that.
The pedals feel like the real thing – sturdy metal footpads attached to pistons. Push down on the accelerator and away you go. Apply pressure to the brake and you’ll come to a stop. Use the clutch in conjunction with the back paddles on the wheel and you can shift gears manually, too. It’s also relatively easy to set up on Xbox and PlayStation, and once it’s plugged in, it calibrates itself (warning: this is where it might somersault off your table). Lovely stuff.
But unless you’re planning to screw the pedal base into a lump of wood, you’re probably going to flip the unit over whenever you put your foot down. There’s not enough counterweight for it to just sit on the floor. It’s cool tech, but the reality of using it is cumbersome.
Then there’s how it performs with games. I was hoping the experience would be transformative, despite the discomfort of my atypical setup. For Forza Horizon 5, that wasn’t the case. Your car constantly oversteers, and there’s no amount of fighting the wheel that will correct it. It’s great if you want to do donuts forever, but this isn’t a good demonstration for racing wheels. Not at all.
It’s not the wheel either. There are endless Reddit posts about Forza Horizon’s wheel support, which has been notoriously rubbish since the series first graced our consoles.
F1 22 is a completely different story, thankfully. Every minor adjustment of the wheel registers here, and using the wheel brings you much closer to the action on the track. You feel the rumble strips as you bank wide to come in tight around a corner, and the wheel fights against you in the same way a real car would when driving at these speeds.
If you have the setup for it, a wheel and a VR headset are probably the ideal way to play this game. It makes even the Xbox Series X Pro controller feel prehistoric. Thanks to a whole face full of buttons, it’s easy to navigate menus and do all the fiddly bits outside of the racing, too.
The only thing holding it back is the amount of setup you need. If you have a dedicated gaming room, absolutely get a racing wheel. If you’re like me and your gaming setup is in your living room, which also houses your partner, your kids, and your cat, probably hold off for now. Unless you’re blessed with a living room large enough to house a pretend cockpit at the back. If that’s you, go for it. Don’t let anyone tell you how to live your life.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.