What's the starting price for entering the world of sim racing?
What's the starting price for entering the world of sim racing?
It looks like another gaming style you might enjoy, but considering the expenses for wheels, shifters, stands, etc., it exceeds $1,000 and feels a bit too pricey. I don’t want to compromise quality by choosing cheaper options that wear out quickly.
Honestly, being "in" sim racing... my wheel spends 99% of its time shoved in my closet. It's too much hassle to constantly drag it out and set it up, then decide I want to use my desk for literally anything else and put it away. So, if you've got a spare PC, or a dedicated space for a sim, great. Step one complete. Step 2. Avoid the community. It sucks. It's ridiculously toxic and voicing any slight negative opinions or criticisms calls out the cult . There's a guy that gets harassed, slandered, and insta-banned from pretty much everything because he shows exploits and criticizes the games. I've personally had the head of Kunos Simulazioni call me an idiot before banning me after his followers of cultists called me a conspiracy theorist because I felt some understeer in an update. Step 3. So you've avoided the community, wonderful. take all the currently available PC sims and stick them on a dartboard. Whichever one you hit is the one you go with. They're all ~99% identical. Step 4. I hope you like aimlessly driving around in circles and hotlapping. The AI in these PC sims are garbage. All of them. The only one that has a decent multiplayer setup is iRacing, and that has a lot of it's own problems that you can't talk about. So anyways, I would recommend Logitech as a cheap starter, I've never used them but they're popular. I started off by buying 2 Thrustmaster wheels which both killed themselves within a week. I've since vowed to never buy anything TM and went with Fanatec. Fanatec at the time was around the same price as the TM, but everything about all of it is way higher quality. The shifter is great, the pedals are better, I've never had a problem with the wheel. I probably spent ~$800-1000 on it, and honestly at this point I wish I would've just bought a camera I would've actually used. It's shitty to say all this, but I honestly in good faith can't really recommend the hobby to people. It's very stagnant and gets old pretty quick. My best consolation would be that Forza is on PC now, but I don't have Win10 so I wouldn't really know. Everyone says the FFB with a wheel is very not great though so they still play with a controller. I'd honestly seriously recommend flight sims over race sims, especially with the new MS flight sim coming soon.
It's possible they resolved the problems since then, right? That was back in 2015 when the model I received was brand new. When the second version arrived and failed before I could install the drivers (since it seemed unnecessary), I disassembled it with my tech friend and discovered a really messy setup. There was a lot of flux residue, glue everywhere, and most chips weren't premium—except for the main controller which had a solid connection over several pins. I saw many Amazon reviews mentioning smoke coming from the wheels, which made sense. One wheel button even came loose. I got these wheels less than a week old, but that's my view. I’ve taken apart Fanatec components and found them clean inside, though they’ve had reliability issues before. I also think their peripherals are much better overall.
During the lockdown, NASCAR shifted focus to iRacing, which doesn’t offer drivers. This video is removed from iRacing’s site because it was made by Austin, who didn’t speak during it. iRacing currently has dirt tracks and only RX, not real rally racing. To play anything meaningful there, you’d need DiRT Rally, the only community I’m involved with—we mostly share memes of Jennifer Aniston or do Easter egg hunts with developers instead of discussing the game.
I appreciate the game for being fun, but it’s not super realistic or flawless. Like real people, it has its quirks. I was a beta tester and got a free copy, which is great. But after trying it, I uninstalled it because it didn’t work well on my older system (around 2015) and I didn’t like the FFB or the throttle controls. Many longtime forum members and series fans have told me they’ve grown tired of it over the past few years. It’s frustrating to tell someone not to try it, but honestly, I don’t think sim racing is worth the effort anymore.