Does a wheel make you faster? Yes? No? My experience.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Met Entso
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I feel like the wheel will make you faster in the high downforce cars, but it doesn't matter as much for most road cars and groups like GR4, GRB and maybe GR3.
 
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RacingFan1
That Skyline is not exactly the smoothest car in the game and the handling is a bit poor but it's far from undriveable and you can drive it smootly. Maybe your wheel doesnt work well
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Agree the skyline was tricky. I tried the wheel at Spa with the Supra GR3 car, something i am really familiar with and good with, I got within 1.5 seconds of my best time, the downforce and grip make it easier to gell with. THe road cars feel absolutely horrible.
 
flair1111
wheel all the way is better. faster for me as i can be smoother and it the turns correctly. can feel the road surface way better.
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Wheel can feel weird at first, if you've put loads of hours in with a controller, but yes, after initial adjustment, way more intuitive as you're reacting in same way to driving irl, using hands and feet v just using a few fingers to do everything.

And as others said, way more immersive.

I'm so hoping we get VR on this when the psvr2 is released next year. Will be incredible, I imagine.

I urge any wheel players to try ACC, if they haven't already. The ffb is simply phenomenal. But I still lean towards gt7 in terms of game time, for some reason. Selection of cars, probably. I'm into weight lifting, so not in bad shape, but if you ramp the ffb up, it's actually almost tiring, battling to keep the car on track:D. I'm using the fanatec dd pro.
 
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For me. I have spend well over 1400 hours using gyro controls on gt7. Hoping it would translate a little into using a wheel that I just got recently. This is not the case, I can typically break the top 1000 times using Gyro but using a wheel? Its a surreal experience compared to it.

They are totally different avenues and takes time. Im very slowly getting a few hundredth of a second faster each day.
 
The pedals made me faster, the left and right thing is just a bonus.

It’s the pedals, my better braking is worth more feedback or torque than any wheel can give.

Turning isn’t the game changer, rumbling steering isn’t the game changer it’s mastering the go fast and slow down bits.

Personally I was considerably faster, and got even faster with VR because the inputs start to be visually rationalised and the cars movement and mass have better visual sense.

But the biggest game changer for most will be learning throttle and brake fidelity rather than turning left and right or “feeling” curbs etc, turning and curbs are noise and not all noise is useful.
 
I feel like the wheel made faster in older GTs but the PS5 controller does a REALLY good job of picking up the slack. Especially, using the triggers for throttle and brake. Like, its not talked about enough. You can really feel with the car breaks loose.
 
CMB350
What pedals are you using, Glen?
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I have used most of them but my current setup is the standard CSL accelerator and the loadcell, with the caveat it takes a little time for it to loosen up.

I was ok with the TLCMs which I feel are better pedals and probably compete with the inverted pneumatic ones for visual feel and fidelity.

I don’t think the pedal tech is the thing more the understanding how to left foot brake effectively and the loadcell allows you pressure vs movement modulation
Mafio
I feel like the wheel made faster in older GTs but the PS5 controller does a REALLY good job of picking up the slack. Especially, using the triggers for throttle and brake. Like, it’s not talked about enough. You can really feel with the car breaks loose.
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That’s fair, although I only play in VR now so find the wheel and being wickedly quick on the opposite lock with the lift off etc is comparable and ultimately more rewarding - for me.

Everyone’s mileage varies and just focus on being as good, fast, safe and fair with whatever you are using control wise.
 
Personal experience her: recently went to a sim racing center for the first. Massive rig. The whole shebang. Triple monitors, load cell pedals, great wheel (forgot checking which one). Caveat being that they ran Assetto Corsa which I had never played before (despite owning it in my PS library).

It was hard. Very hard. I first drove a Porsche GT3 RS (the street legal one) and later a regular GT3 Race Car. I binned it a lot. Trail breaking on the pedals was super hard. I missed apexes or simply overshot corners all the time. I lost the GT3 RS under breaking a lot. Lost the GT3 Race Car through power oversteer a couple times despite using TCS.

I am sure that AC's physics are less forgiving than GT7's. But still. Adjusting to the whole setup would probably take easily 10 hours of seat time for me. Especially getting a feel for the breaks.

That said I am also somewhat positive that eventually I would become a more precise, more consistent and ultimately a faster driver with a rig. But it would take a long long time.
 
I am four weeks into using a wheel and it definitely made me faster, but not by an earth shattering amount. The time trials on Gran Turismo are probably a good way to measure this. With a controller I could only get top 1000's at rally time trials. Now in the last four time trials, using a wheel, I got a P876 at Spa and a P352 at Willow Springs.

Mind you, I have been playing racing games with a controller since the Nintendo 64 and I haven't really optimized the settings of my wheel and pedals yet. So yes, the wheel made me faster.
 
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It took me a while to start beating my controller lap times but my overall race time gave me a lot of hope. I guess a 90% limit on a wheel was a lot better than my usual ragged 105% on the pad.

The biggest change came after finally getting used to the pedals, though. Things really started clicking into place after that.
 

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