SSZ: My Sim Rig (2024)

Hello and welcome back to another edition of Steve’s Simracing Zone. Today I will go over my sim rig that I have been using since January 2024, and why I picked what I did.

I will start right off the bat and say that any brands I mention in this post are not sponsors of myself or my blog, nor do I have any sort of partnership. With that out of the way, let’s get started!

Prior to these purchases, I had a very very entry level setup; a Thrustmaster TX with pedals bundle and a GT Omega Wheel & Pedal stand. I had always complained that I struggled on the brakes and I needed to buy something better to allow me to be more consistent and aggressive. I had originally planned on getting a set of Fanatec Clubsport V3 pedals and keeping the Thrustmaster wheel. A friend of mine had a set of V2’s that he was willing to part with, but I never ended up taking him up on the offer, as my personal life suddenly took up a lot of time away from Simracing.

After covid waned, a different friend of mine invited me over to his place to try out his brand new sim rig. He has a Simucube v2 wheel base and some pedal set with a hydraulic brake. I think they were Heuskenveld’s but I can’t remember exactly. Racing with the direct drive wheel base for the first time was eye opening. I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going to SimRace again until I could upgrade to a DD wheel base, as the experience was life-altering.

However, I knew this meant I would need a proper sim rig chassis to be able to handle the loads of the wheel base I was thinking. This, and I didn’t have space for one in my apartment before I got married. Fast forward a couple years and a new house for my wife and I, and I finally had the money, time and (crucially) the space to buy a new rig.

I originally had budgeted to get a Fanatec DD Wheel with the Clubsport V3 pedals, after ruling out Asetek and Simagic, as they were just out of my price range. Coincidentally, this was right when Fanatec started having issues with customer support and deliveries. I then started looking at other brands again, and that’s when I came across MOZA.

I watched some reviews, I watched some of Jimmy Broadbent’s content and decided that they were what I was going to go with.

For the wheel, I was looking for a good rim more so than the wheelbase its self. I wanted lots of buttons and dials integral to the wheel rim, as I am more of a prototype and open wheel driver. I’d need these for hybrid systems, and various other vehicle systems for a top flight prototype / F1 car. Pre-made button boxes are as expensive as a cheaper wheel rim, so it made more sense just to get a wheel rim with loads of buttons and dials.

With this in mind, and the very good price (especially with black Friday sales), MOZA’s FSR wheel rim fit my criteria perfectly. So I decided to get that with the R12 wheel base, and their CRP pedals, just to keep everything within the ecosystem. I also got the hub extension (I have long legs so I didn’t want to be stretched out grabbing the wheel), and the ES wheel rim for when I’m doing something other than circuit racing.

With that out of the way, time to pick a chassis. I wanted something out of extruded aluminum for the modulator and to be able to handle the loads of the 12Nm wheel base. I researched Playseat and GT Omega, but what they had either didn’t meet my criteria, or was too pricey. I did further digging and came across a few other brands. GTR, Next Level, 6 Sigma, Track Racer and Advanced SimRacing were all other brands I found.

Based on price and features I decided originally to get a GTR brand GTA cockpit, but they didn’t ship to Canada directly and Amazon/Walmart didn’t have the specification I wanted. So, the next best option was an Advanced SimRacing ASR3 (gen 1) chassis. It had far more modularity but was a bit more pricey than the GTR so that was the only reason why I didn’t choose it from the beginning. This was honestly a supremely good choice in hindsight, and also supporting a Canadian company is always a plus in my books.

Once I got everything in the house, assembled them and got them running, it’s been a blast! I swapped out the springs and damper in the brake pedal to the hardest components to better suit my driving style. Funny story about that, I couldn’t install the damper on my own, so I had to enlist my wife’s help. I stood on the load sensor – forcing it towards the pedal, so the bolt holes would line up – as my wife screwed the bolts in.

It’s been 10 months now since then, and I did add a small button box (a cheap $20 aux keyboard with 12 keys and 2 dials) to use for iRacing black box navigation. I do plan on upgrading to CRP2 pedals sometime soon, just because the Mbooster system can only be used with those, and I am curious to how much that is going to cost.

As for my PC; I started out over 10 years ago after abandoning Xbox racing with a mild gaming laptop I was already using for school. It could run iRacing on low graphics with its mtx670 card, and it was great until it blew the charging circuit on the mother board.

I built my first gaming PC in 2017 centred around an Nvidia GTX 1080 and Intel i7 CPU. This worked brilliantly with iRacing and Assetto Corsa at the time I built it, and I was really happy with it. This lasted me a while until I couldn’t use it to play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch in late 2020, so I started spec’ing out my next PC.

I have played a lot of Cities Skylines, and so I had the sequel in mind when I built my new PC. So my current PC has an Intel i9 coupled with an Nvidia RTX 4070 and 32gb DDR5 RAM. This is supremely overkill for simracing on the whole, so needless to say, it works brilliantly with everything. I also bought a Gigabyte 21:9 curved screen monitor on a VESA mount that I can swing over towards the sim rig when I want to race, and have it over my desk when I game or write blog posts.

Enjoy some pictures of my setup, please forgive the mess in the basement!

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