Thrustmaster Ferrari GT Experience Racing Wheel

Got this today. I am very very pleased with it. I have been using an Xbox 360 controller with F1 2010 on my PC (downloaded from Steam) and have been having a very hard time with driving the cars. It does not let you control the car properly; it's fidgety and difficult. However, install the latest Thrustmaser GT 3 in 1 drivers from their site, restart, plug the Guillemot (ie Thrustmaster) GT wheel into a USB slot, set it up via the custom menu in F1 2010 (ie press the buttons to suit how you want the wheel and pedals to operate) and vroooooooooom!! Suddenly, you can control the car well - no fidgety control. Takes a little getting used to and you have to fine tune it via the F1 2010 menu but it is worth it since suddenly you are driving a car rather than trying to control a wayward donkey!

Not only does it work but it is amazing value. It is well made. I thought, given the cheap price, it would be cheap tacky plastic which would soon fall apart. It seems quite the opposite. It is easy to fit to a flat surface using a clamp system and it stays in place. The pedals have a decent resistance to them and feel durable. A bargain.

Very good value for money. Build quality is excellent for the price (I paid £28). I'm not a hardcore gamer and this is the first steering wheel I've had so I can't compare it to other more expensive models but I'm very pleased with it. If there are any negatives: the USB connector where it plugs into the PC feels quite loose but should only fall out if knocked hard. The pedal base does slip sometimes but this depends on the surface of course and I don't see what they could have done without making the base out of concrete. Neither of these are worth deducting a star for, especially considering the price. Even though it's not on the officially supported list, it works with F1 2010 on PC but make sure you install the latest drivers so that the game recognizes the wheel and to enable force feedback. By the way, this IS the Thustmaster wheel, Thrustmaster is a brand name of Guillemot.

I've wanted a racing wheel for quite a while, having always been a fan of racing games. The price, however was what kept me away- decent wheels (with pedals) usually costing around the £60 pound price point. I saw this for £28.97, and decided that was low enough to give it a go. I should point out that I've only used it on the PS3, so this is only a review of how it works with the console.

It plugs in via USB, with each button mapped to a button on the standard controller. The pedals are the equivalent of L2 and R2, while the wheel is mapped to the horizontal axis of the left analog stick. As such, it works on every Playstation 3 game that uses this layout, or with a customisable control layout. You can also re-map the buttons themselves, although I have not needed to do this yet, as all the games I've played have had this option in-game. One issue with this is that you have re-program the wheel each time you turn it on, which I imagine would get fairly tedious. The button system works very well though, and it means that pretty much every game is compatible with the wheel, which can't necessarily be said about a lot of other wheels, even more expensive ones.

I have had some issues with steering sensitivity of some games, where the sensitivity is of course calibrated for the analog stick. This can cause steering to be quite twitchy if the game doesn't have an in-built sensitivity option. You CAN change the wheel itself into high sensitivity mode, but you only get this or the normal sensitivity, and if neither of these settings work for you, there's not a lot you can do. Again, you have to set the wheel to high sensitivity mode each time you reconnect it, although this is done relatively simply and wouldn't be as annoying as re-mapping a large number of buttons.

The build quality of both the wheel and the pedals seems pretty sturdy, there is a bit of a sense of cheap plastic about it, but that doesn't really matter once you're playing. The wheel also has some high-grip areas where you hold it, which is a nice touch. The wheel has a clamp system which it uses to attach to desks/tables etc. You tighten it with a bolt, and this ensure that the wheel grips the surface very tightly and doesn't slide around at all during use. However, the clamp might not fit some tables where there are supports hanging down from the main surface, as it has to fit around anything like this.

Another potential issue is that the pedals don't grip very well, and they tend to slide around quite a lot when in use.

The wheel also has a "bungee cord" system which pulls it back towards the centre. It certainly adds to the wheel, as you get the sense of resistance when you steer. Of course, it's probably not as good as force feedback, but if you want a wheel with that, you will be looking to pay A LOT more.

Altogether, this is a very good wheel and pedal set, it certainly makes racing games a lot more fun and realistic than using a standard controller. It has its issues, but the lack of grip on the pedals is the only one that's particularly major. It's not a high-end wheel, so it can't do certain things, but it doesn't pretend to be, so that's fine by me.