REVIEW - Fanatec CSL Pedals & Load Cell Kit

hey guys so a couple of months ago now we took a look at a pre-production version of fnatic's new csl pedal ecosystem now back then there was a missing piece of the puzzle we didn't have access to the all-important load cell kit now fnatic very kindly sent us across the full kit today to check out for you guys so what i would recommend is go back and have a look at the original review that we did of the pre-production stuff not a whole lot has changed between what we saw then and what we're seeing now so that makes our job a lot easier but we want to try and cover four main questions which we know you guys are wondering about in today's video and keep it as efficient as we possibly can so question number one is it worth upgrading to the load cell kit over the basic pedal set now the load cell kit is of course a little bit more expensive so we'll have a look at whether that is worth the upgrade we'll also see whether the tuning kit is worth the upgrade too but three other big questions that i want to answer in today's video are is it worth side grading i guess you could call it from the csl elite pedals which the load cell kit is no longer available for to these csl pedals these are a little bit cheaper as an overall kit and we will talk about pricing later on is it worth going across to this set from csl elite pedals is it worth skipping these all together and looking at the club sport v3 pedal set including the performance kit but i'm sure another thing a lot of people will be wondering about is how do these pedals compare to the thrustmaster tlcm load cell pedal so we'll be covering that in today's video as well by the end of the video you should have a good idea of whether these are the pedals for you and how they compare objectively to the csl elites the fanatec club sport v3s and the tlcm so let's get going so before we get these guys unboxed let's just quickly run you through pricing so the standard two pedal set which comes with our throttle and brake obviously both position based comes in at 79.95 us dollars or euros if we want to upgrade to the clutch kit as well to give us the three pedal set clutch kit is 39.95 us dollars or euros now remember that the clutch kit becomes redundant if you do buy the load cell pedal kit the load cell becomes the brake and then the original brake becomes the clutch so we'll set that guy aside once we do that so the load cell kit is 139.95 euros or us dollars 119.95 if you buy it during the black friday sales and we will put some links down in the description below for you guys so you can check that out and then the tuning kit if you do wish to go with that is another 34.95 and that is purely just down to you know subjective choice there so we will give that a little run later on as well you know whether we felt like it was worth it or not but purely just down to whether or not you like it basically there's no real advantage to driving with it in terms of you know the core functionality of the pedals so what that ultimately boils down to is if we disregard the clutch kit and the tuning kit we're looking at uh what is it 219.90 for our csl pedals and our load cell kit that's not including the discount during the black friday sales because we don't know when you guys are going to be watching the video obviously so how does that compare to the price of the old csl elite pedals with the load cell kit they came in at 239.90 now obviously you can't buy that load cell anymore so it's kind of redundant but i just want to give you that pricing just for comparison reasons now if you compare that to the clubsport v3 pedals they come in at 359.95 for the basic pedal set with the three pedals obviously the brake is already a load cell in that case 29.95 extra for the performance kit if you want to add that on top and i would definitely recommend you do go for that performance kit if you are looking at the clubsport v3 pedals it is absolutely worth the upgrade it really does transform the driving experience so you're looking at 389.90 for the v3 pedals with the performance kit so quite a lot more expensive than these are now we did make reference to the thrustmaster tlcm pedals a little bit earlier as well now pricing there really varies massively depending on where you purchase them from i've seen pricing anywhere from 195 us dollars all the way up to 400 us dollars so definitely recommend you jump online search all your favorite stores there amazon seems to have deals quite often as well but somewhere between the sort of 200 to 400 range seems to be where they are in us dollars and euros so that's the comparison there so yeah going to be really interesting to see how all of these products compare to each other as we come to expect from fanatic very well packaged here we're just going to slide this out we're going to you know spend as little time here as we possibly can just quickly give you an idea of exactly what's going on we've got our standard inclusions here of a quick start guide takes you through all the important things with regards to mounting wiring and everything we'll of course make sure that's all clear to you in this video too we've got a sticker sheet of course we've got our heel rest slash base plate and that allows us to mount the pedals directly to the face through the holes here take off that layer we've got some desiccant material in there as well so we don't get any moisture issues we've got our rj45 cable some spacers and tools bits and pieces in there to get everything put together then in our second layer here we have our brake pedal and of course our throttle pedal so we'll set this part out of the way now the way this works is very simple you can see we've got four mounting holes in the bottom of each pedal so that's our throttle that is our brake and those simply just correspond with the holes in our heel rest here so all we need to do is just position them however we want and put the screws through which are obviously included in the bag and we're good to go so that means that you can space them far apart if you're wanting to drive with two pedals for formula style driving anything that doesn't require a clutch and of course you can move them closer together if you wish to do so and of course you guessed it if you want to go with the clutch kit as well you would configure like so and then put your clutch on the outside there so let's set all of these bits and pieces aside just for now and we'll grab out our clutch kit quickly as well so this is going to be exactly the same idea quick start guide in the top pardon me there we go okay another sticker sheet more desiccant we've got another little tool kit here as well with four screws so we can drop them in from the top and and then this is almost identical to our throttle pedal except you have a look at the throttle you can see this has connections for our brake clutch and connection back through to the wheelbase with an rj12 connection whereas our clutch pedal just has an rj12 fly lead which we connect back in on this side so we'll set these guys aside again and just quickly run you through this again so we've got our brake we've got our clutch and our throttle these two fly leads are going to connect back into the control module here in our throttle pedal and then that's going to connect back to a wheelbase and it all bolts down on this so simple as that let's have a look now quickly at our load cell kit too so we'll pop that out of the box another quick start guide okay stickers so in this case we have a nice braided usb cable this does add the usb functionality to the kit as well so if you're just running with the clutch kit the standard brake and the standard throttle pedal you are limited to connecting the pedals only to the wheelbase via the rj12 connection you don't have any usb connectivity unless you buy the phonetic club sport usb adapter which allows you to connect pedals in or a handbrake or clutch to usb directly so if you're wanting to use the pedals with a different ecosystem you will need to buy that adapter unless you buy the load socket so that's one added advantage of the load cell but we get our usb a to b cable as well as a rj12 fly lead for connecting our load cell as well so let's pop this guy out there we go that's actually got quite a bit of weight to it it feels quite nice and solid and uh yeah i think uh at least as an initial impression it feels a lot more solid a lot more high quality than i was actually expecting so yeah that's pretty good so one more thing to have a quick look at here as well our pedal tuning kit so essentially all this is is just replacement faces here you can see the standard ones are this rounded black plastic probably not going to bother the majority of people we'll talk about that when we get into the driving experience later on but you do have the option for a tuning kit which literally just bolts on and replaces all three pedal pads now you may recognize this finish from the club sport v3 pedal so it is exactly the same brushed aluminium anodized finish and yeah it's as simple as that so it is quite cheap to go with the standard three pedal set which is a hall effect sensors across all three pedals now the use of hall effect sensors is an important thing to call out because on the csl elite pedals which this supersedes in the phonetic ecosystem that was actually using rotary potentiometers which are a moving part and they can wear out and take on dust and debris over time we have seen that happen on a few sets of csl elite pedals our own actually needed to be cleaned out a couple of times to get things working back to normal so with hall effect sensors all you're doing is measuring the flow of electrons across a metal plate and how that's influenced by a magnet or a magnetic field as you move the pedal the magnetic field changes and that is interpreted as a as a signal as an input value for the sims so no moving parts less wear and tear definitely an upgrade at least in terms of the mechanical construction whether or not it makes any difference in terms of the driving feel obviously will determine a little bit later on but yeah an important thing to call out there obviously load cell pedal is using a load cell in both cases with the csl elite and the csl pedals now we did mention earlier that the load cell kit essentially makes the clutch kit redundant so let's spin all the pedals around now and quickly explain exactly how that works so we've got our throttle we've got our load cell brake we've got our standard brake and we've got our clutch kit so you can see between the throttle the standard brake and the standard clutch all three are using the hall effect sensor you can actually see that just there that's the sensor and that is the magnet that i was referencing just before so all three of these pedals are pretty much the same in their fundamental design now you can see the little foam insert here which is what gives us our sensation when we push down on our standard brake pedal and obviously you can see straight away that is a lot softer than our load cell pedals if i put the same amount of force just with my hand there you can see just how different that is so obviously it's going to be a very different driving feel even before we even get into the difference between a load cell pressure based system and a hall effect sensor positional based system so when we purchase the load cell kit that essentially makes the clutch kit redundant so we're going to set that aside out of the way so all we then need to do to convert our standard brake into our clutch pedal is just remove this little foam insert now that simply just pulls out according to the instructions so yep i can just grab it pop it out just like that set it aside and that is now a clutch pedal so you can see it does still have this part here but that is essentially redundant because you can see the plastic bump stop here is what's interfacing with the metal here before it touches that so that functions exactly the same way as our clutch kit did previously and that's the reason why the clutch kit is redundant if you buy the load cell so that leaves us with a clutch a load cell break and a throttle we then can mount the three to our heel plate and that is it so let's quickly talk about electrical connectivity here as well so you can see now we have two control modules so we've got the original one inside our throttle pedal which had the rj12 connection to our wheelbase we now have the upgraded one in our load cell which again does have a wheelbase connection as well as a pc connection so you can run the pedals through the wheelbase to get that added functionality of the tuning menu customization or we can connect directly to our pc if we're running it with a different ecosystem so what we would do now is connect our brake which is now our clutch to the clutch input on the throttle pedal so that is simply going to plug in like so then we're going to take our rj12 fly lead which came included with the load cell kit that is going to connect from the wheelbase connection on our throttle pedal back across to the load cell connection on our load cell like so and then we would connect through to our wheelbase with the rj12 connection or our pc now never connect both of them i have actually seen cases where people have damaged control modules by connecting to the wheelbase as well as the usb i assume that's probably related to the fact that it's getting two power sources from the two different connections so yeah definitely choose one or the other not both so from there it is as simple as just clipping your cables into the provided cable management clips here screwing the pedals into the desired positions and you're good to go but before we do that i do want to just quickly run you through some of the features of this load cell pedal specifically so we'll get everything unplugged again and let's focus in on that so we've got our csl elite pedal set here with our load cell as well as our csl pedal load cell to do a bit of comparison first of all i wanted to just take you through the design of this so we can see in the back here we've got an elastomer stack as it's called so as we push down on the pedal those elastomers compress and you'll get a better look at this when we get up and driving in just a minute now we have a 60 sure rating on the hardness here and it isn't adjustable unlike our csl elite pedals which you can see actually had a little foam insert here by default to give us a little bit of initial uptake in the pedal now that is you know a subjective thing some people might like that some people might not like it at all and actually found that it was a little bit too much on the csl elite pedals that was one of the things that i wasn't a big fan of on these i do like to have a little bit of uptake but probably only about half of what was here but the big point here is that we did have a selection of elastomers to give us an adjustable range between about 60 and 90 sure for our csl elite pedals whereas with the csl pedal we don't have that adjustability so what you get is what you get if you don't like it then you're going to have to get creative in the diy space to make any adjustments here now it shouldn't be too difficult to modify this but again we do have to remember that we do have to operate within the confines of what is provided by the load cell as well so obviously if you make it too stiff you're going to end up saturating your load cell or if you were to make it too soft you might end up in a situation where you weren't taking advantage of the full resolution of the load cell and therefore not getting an accurate measurement inside the game so you will just need to take those kinds of things into account if you are getting creative with diy now i have seen a couple of comments from people comparing the 60 kilogram load cell in the csl pedal load cell kit to the 90 kilogram load cell that we have in the csl elite kit so that may sound like a downgrade and it may well be we'll comment on that when we go for a drive a little bit later on but what i did want to do here is point out an objective difference in the fundamental design between the two pedals so in the case of the csl pedal or the csl pedal load cell kit this is the load cell that we're looking at on the back here and you can see this little cutout in the metal here so what happens is as we push down on the pedal there's a little bit of deflection in that metal and the actual load cell or the strain gauge in that load cell is this little part here which is housed inside some resin so what happens is it measures the deflection on that piece of metal there and that's what's ultimately determining the amount of force that's being applied to the pedal now in the case of the csl elite pedal rather than being in the base plate here it's actually measuring the amount of deflection in the pedal arm itself so inside this little part on the back here so again we don't know exactly how that's going to impact the driving experience just yet so i'm certainly not making excuses but i just wanted to point out that there is a fundamental difference between the design on the two pedals so ultimately it's not comparing apples and apples when we have a look at the 60 kilogram load cell on the csl pedal compared to the csl elite pedal i thought that was an important thing to just point out here one other important point of difference here is the csl elite load cell had a resolution of 16 bit whereas the csl load cell has a resolution of 12 bits so what that means in the real world with this csl elite you had a resolution of 65 536 points throughout the stroke so essentially what that means is you got 65 536 different measurement points as you push down the pedal and you can imagine you know that is a huge amount of measurement range for such a small amount of stroke with 12-bit resolution we have 4096 points of resolution so you can imagine they're 4096 points as we're pushing down on the pedal whether or not you can feel the difference between the two personally i can't i've talked about this in many other pedal reviews that we've done in the past i really think that you know beyond 12-bit resolution you just don't really get any benefit when it comes to pedals obviously if you're talking about rotation on a wheelbase or something like that it's very different that resolution can definitely absolutely make a difference but in the context of pedals at least for me i can't tell the difference between the two and i don't really see that to be a problem but you know other people may disagree with me and that's absolutely fine let us know in the comments what you guys think so look other than that very very simple design you can see the metal cage here with the nice pearl plating finish that's on it same deal across all three petals and again we commented on all that stuff when we had a look at the prototype model a little bit earlier on so if you wanted to see more around that design element then go and check out that video we've got a load cell sitting on the back here you know the electronics are exposed you can see the part on the back there but there's no real moving parts here no sort of opportunity for dust or debris to get in and if we spin it around here you can actually see a little plastic insert here where the cable runs out and yeah it's all nicely managed and everything there's no exposed wiring or cables anywhere which are likely to get snagged or caught up in your shoes or anything like that obviously they are using some plastics here and we would expect that for the price as well but yeah look there's no metal to metal contact anywhere we've got plastic inserts and you know bushings everywhere we need to i don't anticipate that we'll have any problems with with creaking or groaning or squeaks or anything like that but obviously we'll look at that when we go for a drive too but yeah look for the price again we do have to we do have to adjust our expectation here compared to a lot of the other pedals that we've reviewed recently here on the channel and yeah i'm not seeing any issues whatsoever with the basic design here so let's let's get these all connected up now let's get it mounted up on the base plate i just want to quickly run you through a couple of things when it comes to mounting the pedals as well then we'll get into software and driving so we've got our csl pedals mounted up now we've got our throttle our load cell brake and our original brake which is now converted into a clutch so i just wanted to take you through a couple of notes with regards to general usability and mounting so first thing and i think probably the most important thing with regards to this load cell is the fact that you are not going to be using this on carpet or any sort of a polished or tiled floor without having it fixed somehow in position so you are definitely going to need some sort of a wheel stand or a mounting you know some sort of a mounting solution so these aren't going to move around on the floor likewise if you're using a chair with rollers on it you're going to have a bad time using a load cell brake as well and that's not a complaint about these pedals specifically any sort of load cell break you're going to have problems if things are moving around and the reason why that is such a big deal is because breaking in particular all comes down to muscle memory so if things are changing if things are moving if we don't have that consistency every single time we push the pedal we're never going to establish that muscle memory and all the benefits from the money that you've spent on a load cell break are all just going to go straight out the door so when you're buying a load cell break and this is this is one of the things with sim racing in general we've talked about this before it is a bit of a rabbit hole when you upgrade one thing it does lead to the necessary upgrade of other things as well and high quality pedals and a solid mounting solution are the two most important things when it comes to driving quickly and consistently in sim racing so i just wanted to point that out straight away if you are considering the load cell you're going to need to have a solid mounting solution which includes a chair which isn't going to move around every single time you push on the pedals so hopefully that's clear i wanted to explain one other thing for you guys as well if we flip these up now we highlighted this in our closer look at the prototype hardware as well so if you've already watched that video i will be repeating myself a little bit here but i think this is important to understand for those who might have skipped through that video so if we look at the underside here we've got some holes in the rear for mounting a bolt through into our rig and then we've got two tapped threads on the mounting plate here as well so you can see we've got these spacers which make that line up so essentially we have to bolt in from the underside into these m6 threads here to mount these pedals on the front half now the reason why i highlight that is because it's going to make mounting onto profile or anything where you can't get in from the underside pretty much impossible with these pedals so that is a really important difference between the mounting solution that we have on these pedals and the mounting solution that we had on the csl elite pedals you can see on these ones we've actually got a little channel in the side here and no thread so what we could do is we could get a bolt in it was a little bit awkward but you could get a bolt in or a nut in and actually go from the top down which meant you could mount it on a solid piece of hardware without the need to be able to get in from underside so you can imagine for aluminium profile in particular there's no way once you've got a you know once you've got a t-nut inside the profile there's no way to get in underneath it and screw something up from the bottom so that's the reason why i'm highlighting that so i do prefer even though it was a little bit clumsy and not everybody liked it i do prefer the more versatile mounting solution on the csl elite pedals to what we have on these now again remembering the target market for these pedals most people probably aren't going to be mounting these on the type of rig where it's going to be a problem so i'm not saying you know this is a major issue or anything like that it's just something to be aware of because it will limit the solutions that are available for mounting the pedals but other than that you can see very straightforward we've got our four bolts in position or four screws i should say for each of the pedals no issues at all with flex from side to side even before we've even bolted them down so once those are bolted to our rig there's going to be no issues with side to side movement whatsoever and you can see we do have these these rubber pads here to stop them from moving around on the floor and they do work absolutely fine we did test that when we went for a drive with the standard hall effect sensor based brake pedal but again with the load cell pedal you are going to have issues if you don't have these fixed into position but i think that is everything we need to cover in terms of the hardware we will have a look at the tuning kit a little bit later once we get up and driving too but yeah let's get into software calibration and driving experience we're going to compare to the experience with the csl elite pedals the tlcm pedals as well we want to definitely check those out and yeah hopefully pretty soon we'll know whether these are the pedals for you let's go okay so pedals all set up now on our next level racing elite which is a nice solid cockpit should be absolutely fine for these pedals not going to have any problems with flex interfering with the review process now what we've done is we've set up the original brake that comes with the csl pedals back with the foam insert again in the clutch position but this allows us to do a direct comparison between the feeling of the default brake pedal and the load cell kit upgrade so if you want to see a full breakdown on the driving experience with the standard brake go and check out our prototype review video that we did a couple of months ago hasn't changed at all and it's feeling and how it performs and operates so that is still very much valid i do just want to quickly touch upon the difference in the feeling between the two pedals and then we'll do our driving test today specifically with the load cell talk about the experience with that now you also notice that i am driving with socks on doing that intentionally because i'm assuming that the majority of people that are in the market for a set of pedals around this sort of budget probably aren't going to be forking out for an expensive set of racing boots but we will do a little bit of testing with boots on as well just to see how the performance is there and we will of course touch on the tuning kit those replacement pedal faces a little bit later but what i can tell you straight off the bat with socks on these pedal faces actually do feel quite good to me i uh and you would have seen this when i did the acer tech pedal review a couple of weeks ago i do like to sort of slide the pedal underneath my foot as you can see there so as i push down the throttle the pedal is kind of just sliding in because of that beveled or curved face it actually has quite a nice feeling to it and allows you to push it from multiple different angles as well without it feeling different so it does actually feel quite consistent regardless of the angle that you're pushing it on up to a point if you do have the pedals completely flat though they are on quite a tilt forward so i did find that the spring progression just felt a little bit weird and again it's compared to what i'm used to you absolutely would adapt to these pedals and it wouldn't be a problem but it kind of felt like i was already halfway through the pedal stroke by the time i actually started pushing it so did require a little bit of reset in muscle memory just to get my head around the throttle but again if you were to buy these pedals and get used to them that's not going to be a problem i assume that's done intentionally so that you can run the pedals on the floor obviously if you're in a more upright seating position having your feet flat down to the ground you will need that angle so that you can control your inputs a little bit more so remembering again if we do upgrade to the load cell that's going to be off the cards we're not going to be able to put these on the floor regardless of the kind of surface you have because they're just going to slide away but if you do have some sort of means of you know fixing your chair to the pedals even if it's just like a plank of wood that you bought the chair and the pedals to even on the floor that will work absolutely fine so it is quite a versatile design in that regard but just be aware that if you are mounting on a rig because we have those curved pedal faces it is still quite adaptable if you change over to the tuning kit then obviously you're doing away with that curve which means you will be more limited in the angle that you can use the pedals on you will have to you know adjust your rig around to suit so again that's going to be a subjective thing it's going to completely depend on how you've got things set up but just something to be aware of there uh now look in terms of the comparison between the two brake pedals the load cell does feel very good actually i'm i'm it's it's beyond my expectation for a for a load cell of this price point just on initial face value here so when i push the pedal down there's a couple of things that i look for specifically i look for any binding any texture in the pedal and i also look for a really clearly nicely defined threshold point so what i mean by that is a point where i can push the pedal down too consistently and actually feel the right amount of pressure fighting against me so i can feel by pressure how far i'm pushing the pedal rather than by the distance that i'm actually pushing it so i can push down to there and just having a look at my brake pressure on the screen you can see that is maxing out the load cell at the moment with the brake force set to 30 so i'm going to go ahead and adjust that up and for me in the majority of cars that i'm driving at the moment i'm doing mostly gt3 so i like to have my threshold point at around about that eighty percent break pressure so i'm actually going to wind that up even further still maybe a little bit more so i'm gonna set it to maximum and yeah okay so that's about right that's about right for me so i can't think of a scenario where i'd ever push harder than about that that would be my maximum so i'm not saturating the load cell there i am close even on the maximum setting so that's something just to be aware of if you are really heavy footed then you may run into issues maxing out the load cell but i think if you're breaking with finesse then it's not going to be an issue and again it will be something that i think that you'll adapt to so i don't think that the 60 kilogram load cell is going to be an issue for the majority of people it certainly isn't going to be for me but again it's just going to be you know depending on your style but you know you will need to adapt your style to suit the pedals that you're running with and that's that's the case for any pedals it's never going to be you know something just works absolutely perfectly for you without any tweaking or adjustment or you know resetting your muscle memory so yeah i think that's going to be fine but again back to the threshold point if i push down i'm hitting that sort of 70 80 percent about there so that was a little bit higher that was a little bit higher and i should be doing it without looking at the chart because i'm modulating based off what i'm seeing but if i look away about there about there about there that one wasn't any good about there so you can see how consistent i'm being with that straight away and i haven't set any muscle memory yet now if we have a look at the bar for the clutch here that is our original brake pedal as it's set up at the moment now obviously you could calibrate this in-game or even in the settings which we'll have a look at in just a moment to adjust a little bit but the point here is that i feel very little resistance behind my foot i can push that pretty much all the way to the mechanical bump stop at the end of the travel and i feel very little change in the amount of resistance that's fighting against me so again somebody may come up with some sort of insert to change the feeling there so i'm not saying that it's always going to be that way but by default again remembering that we don't have any mechanical adjustability with the pedal that you know i that's again you could get used to driving with this so i'm not saying that you know it's bad but it's just so different from what i'm used to with a load cell or a pressure based system so what that means in the real world is when i push my foot down i just have no reference point for how much pressure i'm putting in it's purely based off the position and because i'm not used to breaking in that style it's a real struggle for me so you can absolutely get used to driving that way and there's plenty of examples of people that are lightning fast on position-based brake pedals so i'm not saying that you can't drive quickly with these pedals but i think when it comes down to consistency you know based on pressure rather than position is always going to be a better way to do it and we use the analogy in our asytech pedal review recently of you know trying to you know close your eyes and touch a point on a table multiple times and you're going to struggle to touch the same place every single time but if you push down on a set of scales with your eyes closed it's a lot easier to match the same pressure every single time so it's a lot easier fundamentally for your body to remember the amount of force that it's putting on something rather than the position that you're inputting so hopefully that makes sense again if you want to see the experience driving with the brake pedal and how that actually went for us then not check out our original review of the csl pedals but now let's get into the software a little bit here it's very basic interface we do have the pedals connected via the rj12 cable into the wheelbase so we do have the ability to make adjustments on the fly from the wheel as well and if you want to understand how that works have a look at any one of our phonetic wheel or wheelbase reviews where we go through the tuning menu there but basically you have an adjustment in the menu here where you can adjust your brake force exactly the same as you see here up and down now it's not something that you'd generally be adjusting on the fly anyway so it's not massively advantageous having that so you can connect them by usb if you want obviously it frees up a usb port on your machine as well if you connect through the base and again obviously if you're running on a console then that is necessary as well so we can see here graph for our throttle our clutch and our brake obviously handbrake two we don't have that connected currently we've got a switch here to combine the pedals into one axis as well some older games do require that so that is a good feature to have there not something that you see on many pedals these days so i'm glad that they do include that we've got our adjustment for brake force as we saw before and i've also got a button here to enable the csl pedal load cell kit manual mode so this allows us very simply to just set a maximum and minimum threshold point for each of the pedals again the brake is based off our brake force so we can set a minimum dead zone and then obviously our brake force determines the maximum that we have to push down the pedal to to operate that so all very straightforward there no need to really go into any more detail on the software i don't think and again you can just go back in and jump around to your various other peripherals and configure everything from the one interface which is nice and clean definitely one of the strengths i would say in the fnatic ecosystem and something that shouldn't be overlooked but that is it for software so let's get in now and do some driving okay so as always we'll start off with our initial tests here in iracing doing the porsche 911 cup car around immolar now i really love this car and track combination for testing pedals in particular because this car is very very difficult to drive doesn't have any abs it's also like a pendulum with the engine in the back too so if you do get things wrong under braking you loop around really really easily you really do have to have a lot of fine uh fine feel on the pedals a lot of finesse in your braking and a lot of finesse in your modulation so good test there the track is also particularly good because you've got a lot of off camber stuff going on you've got braking zones where you're coming around corners downhill and again very very easy to lose the back end of the car so perfect storm of all the things that are fighting against you when you're trying to drive quickly now we're not paying attention to lap times here really either simply because you know it's a brand new rig to me with the you know projector and everything set up differently from what i'm used to so there's a lot of things that are fighting against me here but we can definitely talk about the feeling of the pedals and the initial impressions there so let's get underway [Music] so i'm gonna just basically do all the things that i would normally do on this track so break in the same places and just sort of see how natural and instinctive things feel to me [Applause] [Music] and i didn't just lock up the brakes immediately into turn one which i thought may happen [Music] a little bit of a pinch there on the rear right i think but that's okay [Music] late apex [Music] so i'm finding i can really modulate my throttle very well as well the way that plastic pedal face slips underneath my sock is really comfortable it gives me a lot of control so i'm quite happy with the plastic pedal pieces i mean you know they don't feel expensive and premium but they definitely get the job done and like i do prefer it again it's a subjective thing but i do prefer to have quite a slippery pedal face particularly when driving with socks it's something that i've had to get used to with the acetech invicta pedals that i'm driving with at the moment but again it's just a personal preference thing get it turned in try not to lose the back end there under throttle easy to get too keen on the throttle so this corner is the particularly difficult one you've got to brake as you come around the apex here break down the hill and get it pulled up but i was able to modulate my braking pretty comfortably there [Applause] [Music] and i'm actually quite surprised with the level of control that i'm feeling through the load cell it's quite instinctive and you know casting my mind back to driving with the um houstonvale ultimate plus pedals which is the last load cells that i used i was driving with them up until quite recently a little bit of lock up there so it is that little bit softer than what i would normally have but again that is just a subjective thing unfortunately we don't have any adjustability with these pedals so that is definitely a a downside you're not going to be able to tune them to be exactly the way you might like them but i think you'll definitely be able to get your head around them and you'll be able to adjust your muscle memory to suit what's on offer here and i think that's probably the most important thing the fundamentals to feeling what you need to feel to drive quickly absolutely there with this load cell which was i guess what i was most concerned about given the price point is there may be too many uh too many sacrifices i guess but doesn't really seem to be the case and the struggles that i'm having here just purely down to a complete reset in muscle memory rather than the fact that i'm not feeling what i need to feel to drive so breaking about the 80 get it turned in all right easy on the throttle [Music] try to pick up the pace a little bit now [Music] so i did have another little lock up there i'm just tempted to put more pressure in than i should be simply because of the pedals that i'm used to but i'm learning and i was able to back out there and modulate my input to stop the lock up and still pull the car up for the apex so yeah there's no there's no red flags so far we'll try to go a little bit quicker now i'll probably crash again we're not really paying attention to lap times here because there are so many things of different but breaking up to 200 [Music] did have another little lock up there i'm just adjusting to that threshold point still again i was able to modulate on him on entry though [Music] [Applause] breaking at the 50 late apex get it back on the gas as early as we can without the car swinging around really liking the throttle pedal i gotta say [Music] it has a really good amount of control [Music] get it turned in back on the gas not too greedy with the throttle braking at the 50 turn in little dab on the gas again and heavy braking again a little lock up there just trying to get my head around the exact amount of pressure that's required remember this car is extremely sensitive under the brakes so [Music] so yeah absolutely feeling all the things that i need to feel and yeah look i'm honestly this in particular the load cell but the pedals as a whole considering the price point i've got to say it does exceed my expectations i'm feeling all the things i need to feel and while obviously my pace is down because it's not the hardware that i'm used to driving with i can definitely say that if i was to put hours and hours and hours into this i would adjust my muscle memory and i would have all the control that i need i think and beyond that it's really just down to subjective choice so what we'll do now is we'll put a bunch of uh we'll put a bunch of time into it again we'll put the uh tuning kit on as well we'll do some driving with boots on as well see how that feels uh we'll put the tlcm pedals on the rig as well see how they compare we'll get tom in the rig too can let him do some driving and get his impressions and yeah we'll wrap it all up with our conclusions [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we've both spent quite a bit of time driving with all the pedals that you see on the table over the last couple of days but i wanted to start off by just talking about the csl pedals specifically within their own little ecosystem there's a few different options and configurations there that we can choose from so we'll start off at the beginning what did you think about the driving experience with the throttle and just the brake remember we do have the more detailed review that we did of the prototypes before but just to let people know quickly what did you think well i think overall given the price point they're a very well presented set of pedals they do the job yeah really well they're very smooth feeling there's no funny noises coming from them there's no you know graininess or any inconsistencies in the feeling or anything like that um the break is very light feeling yeah but not as light as a lot of other really cheap sets of pedals so yeah uh yeah it's pretty good i think that the standout thing for me is you know while they do look very basic and very bare bones they almost look like a skeleton of a pedal set yeah all of the important things again factoring in the price point are kind of covered so you've got a really good rigidity from side to side there's no excessive flex from side to side or play there's no dead zone you know there's nothing like that um you don't have metal to metal contact for the bump stops you do have plastic there so that quiets it down a little bit there as well we've got hall effect sensors across both pedals too so you know all those main things are kind of covered and i don't see any cause for concern when it comes to reliability there's plenty of adjustment there too at least in terms of you know up and down left and right that kind of thing obviously we don't have any pre-load adjustment but yeah you don't have pre-loaded adjustment on anything that comes anywhere close to this price so yeah i think as you know for me at least a standalone two pedal set it does a really good job when you're looking at things like logitech pedals and things like that they really do stand up really well absolutely so um yeah definitely i think if you're you know if you're looking at a entry-level pedal set to get you into the phonetic ecosystem then yeah really really good choice there you definitely won't be disappointed so i think the main thing for me is the the load cell is so much better than the standard brake like it really is a transformative upgrade it is so for me given that the clutch kit is what is it 39.95 the load cells are 139.95 so 100 u.s more if you buy it in the black friday sale it's 119.95 so you save yourself 20 bucks there but yeah look the load cell is so much better yeah that i would definitely recommend you know if the best that you can afford is the basic pedal set and you really do need to have a clutch for the type of driving that you're doing maybe you're doing a lot of drifting or something like that where braking isn't maybe quite so important as it is when you're sort of threshold braking on a race track then yeah go for it but for the majority of people that are interested in driving quickly and consistently you know in in racing style sim driving then um i would definitely put the money towards the load cell kit and not worry about the clutch kit remember again if you have skipped to this part of the video the configuration we have here is if you buy the basic pedal set and then the load cell kit then the standard brake becomes the clutch and the clutch kit becomes redundant so you don't need to buy both so yeah for me clutch kit not a not really a compelling thing no not really i would definitely save the money for the load cell kit but i think if that's the best that you can afford then yeah if you've got 40 bucks and you really really need a clutch okay maybe but yeah it's definitely worth saving up in my opinion as well exactly so that's the clutch kit now the last thing here as well is of course the tuning kit so look for me it it does look cool it does look better i actually kind of preferred driving with these i think just because of the rounded face i found that it did increase the adjustability in terms of angle on the pedals to suit more of a wider range of rigs simply because you know having that curved edge method you could hit it straight everywhere yeah yeah but all right i kind of like having slippery pedals anyway i like to have the throttle pedal kind of slide under my foot as i push it that's just my style fair yeah and i think it is a very subjective thing but you yeah i quite like the what are they calling it the tuning kit yeah tuning all right yeah it's a bit of a funny name isn't it because it's not really like yeah it could pull you into thinking you get more adjustments out of it as well but no she's done just the pedal plate the faces yeah so i know i do quite like them though um driving with stocks which i do quite often yeah it does feel more solid and metal underneath your foot and when you hit the bump stops with these ones there is this kind of hollow feeling yep i found fetch so they put me off a little bit but with these ones there's still that kind of hollow feeling when you hit the bump stops that you don't get in much more heavy duty sets of pedals but this did reduce that a little bit yeah so and i like the look of them for me they're pretty cool but they aren't cheap no what's the price on those so it's uh 35 us dollars 35 euro 34.95 like yeah i mean it's an aesthetic upgrade essentially essentially yeah yeah so if you like it is it worth the money yeah that's i think really honestly how much money you've got it's a subjective thing so yeah look overall looking at this little ecosystem in itself i think they've done a really good job in the overall design um yeah it really does tick all the boxes and i think like honestly for me i think the the main takeaway here is if you told me that these cost maybe 20 to 30 percent more than they cost i'd still think that they were pretty good yeah you'd be so missing some adjustments yeah yeah but no in terms of how they feel the quality of the feeling you get when you press on them yeah you'd believe it definitely so the next big question to answer of course is are these an upgrade from the csl elite pedal so we have the load cell there as well i would say no if you um if you already own a set of csl elite pedals unless you wanted a load cell upgrade and you because you can't buy that anymore for those pedals uh that would be the only really compelling reason i would see to swap across to these from those yeah otherwise they fulfill the same need and the same purpose and there are elements of the csl elite pedals that i actually prefer over these i do like the kind of clean and basic design of these um but really the only thing i found was just that adjustment in the load so having the um having the adjustment between 60 sure up to about 90 sure i think it is whereas with the csl load cell you don't have that adjustment you are stuck with what you get out of the box so again uh yeah the the main comparison there that i think most people will be making is comparing the 60 kilogram load cell and 12 bit resolution that you get with the csl load cell to the 16 bit and 90 kilogram load cell that you get on the csl elite pedals now for me i just didn't really notice any difference between the two yeah i did have to sort of adjust my style a little bit to make sure i wasn't maxing these out okay so yeah i am used to much stiffer pedal um so i did have to change yeah that's not necessarily a bad thing it's just not what i've been used to so yeah yeah i would prefer to be having a little bit more scope for pressing on that harder yeah but uh you'd get used to it yeah for me like i'm used to having that little bit of uptake in the pedal uh and i am used to driving with extremely stiff pedals with the acertec invicta um prototypes that were running on the main rig at the moment but i found that i was able to adapt pretty well to this it did have a nice threshold point in there which was well within the range of uh measurement for the load cell so i didn't find maxing the load cell out to be a problem for me but yeah if you are really heavy-footed then you know you may find that to be a problem for you one of the things that you have to accept with any set of pedals is there is going to be a learning curve yeah you are going to have to adapt how you do it and i think you know if you were to you know if you were to learn to drive again using the isotec pedals as an example because they're so stiff you know if you were to get used to that and then try to drive with the thrustmaster tlcms forget good luck yeah forget it so you know there is going to be a bit of a learning curve there and again remembering that people are likely to be upgrading from something like g27 pedals or you know something like that to this i don't think that it's going to be a problem for most people but yeah that's that's my take on that situation yeah so yeah to summarize that for me if you already have the csl elites don't side grade because it is a side grade it's not an upgrade uh these are cheaper than those were there's no real compelling reason to switch between the two i don't think you know you're missing out by buying these instead of buying those for me um yeah yep agreed okay cool so next comparison is these versus the tlcms from thrustmasters so this is a comparison that i've been wanting to do for a long time you remember we had that um stages of upgrade video series that we were working on and we kind of put the brakes on that until we had these to do a comparison between the two so this was something i was really interested in now look i'm going to be completely honest i was actually really disappointed with the tlcm pedals they are a little bit cheaper if you get them at a good price around 200 us dollars i think is the best price i've seen i've seen them up to about 400 but the pricing really does seem to vary depending on when you buy but assuming that they're 200 us dollars which is 20 us dollars cheaper than their csl pedals with the load cell kit without the tuning kit um honestly i just didn't think that there was any comparison between the two these are just fundamentally so much better let's actually let me pass that to you quickly and i want to bring the tlc and pedals into the shot here so on paper at least the tlcms do actually sound like they're the better option they've got 100 kilogram load cell as opposed to the 60 on the csl pedals uh we have adjustability in the load cell as well so we do have a little kit that comes with a whole bunch of springs and washers and inserts and bits and pieces that give us some adjustability whereas we have none on the csl pedals but the experience for me was just really underwhelming with the tlcm pedals even on the stiffer setting just found that they were there yeah like i just found that pedal was going straight to the floor straight away and if i spin them around here that's not quite the hardest setting so we have the two hardest springs here you can also fill out that lighter spring there with some washers as well which gives you a more linear response what we have here is the weaker spring in the middle to give us that little bit of initial uptake in the pedal and that does give us a threshold point but you can see here i can actually push that to the threshold point with my index finger no problem at all so even at the stiffer setting that is quite weak and i found after learning to drive with these when i went to drive with these ones i was just pushing it straight to the ground even on the maximum setting for me i can't see any reason why anybody would ever want to have these adjusted lighter no unless you're driving on a carpet floor or tiles or something where you needed to have them not attached to a rig i think that's really the only area where i thought that this might be of benefit over the csl pedals was just in those scenarios where you might need to have them on a floor and not have to worry about them sliding around yeah for young kids or for young kids maybe as well yeah but i mean there's just a few other elements that i just didn't i just don't like on the tlcms i mean like even just look at the amount of movement the pretty old things yeah i mean like that's got barely any movement at all like they just feel cheap compared to these so yeah overall just a very different approach to a set of pedals from thrustmaster compared to fnatic uh despite them being quite similar on paper and even these potentially sounding like they would be better on paper totally agrees yeah it goes to show that on paper it doesn't matter so much does it because yeah 100 kilogram load cell compared to the 60s you could yeah it just doesn't seem like that so as you were saying before with the the side grade here from 90 kilograms to 60 it's not the important factor here exactly what we're talking about because that 100 kilograms was nothing at all under your foot it was yeah silly so what we've been saying that you know you do adapt to a different pedal set and that kind of thing i feel like these ones are going gonna be giving you a disadvantage and they're gonna be harder to learn yeah i feel like these are a much more minor upgrade from a i'd say probably the best way i can describe it is you know because you do have so much movement in the pedal even though it's a load cell you're still kind of relying on that hybrid kind of muscle memory where you're kind of partly using position partly using pressure but not really dependent on any one of the two yeah probably threshold point is when you extend your big toad yeah rather than um yeah so that's that's the experience using these compared to these they are starkly different from each other yeah and i think that's important to highlight even though they do sound quite similar on paper so for me i would choose the phonetic csl pedals with the load cell over these every day of the week 100 so let's move things around again a little bit here we'll uh actually we'll put these down on the ground so comparing to the fanatec v3s now these were the first big upgrade that i had along with my clubsport wheelbase 2.5 when i jumped up from a logitech g27 so this was a really steep learning curve for me for a lot of the reasons that we talked about in this video so probably a good little example there but i drove with the standard foam inserts for the load cell for about three months before upgrading to the performance kit which is absolutely a no-brainer upgrade in my book that was a transformative experience going from the phone to the performance kit so looking at the pedals standard there 360 us or 359.95 performance gets an extra 30 bucks on top us and absolutely worth it now we do have the damper kit on here as well which i don't recommend i didn't feel like it added anything to the driving experience we did try it on the throttle pedal as well and i found that added a little bit of lift off lag on the pedal made it a little bit more difficult to control the throttle even though it did feel quite nice so yeah i would say definitely don't waste your money on the damper kit i would actually go as far as saying it is a waste of money there are other things that you would be far better off spending that money on but look in terms of a i mean looking at it objectively it is a expensive upgrade from the csl pedal so what are your thoughts you've driven with these quite a bit as well yeah i moved from the csl elites over to these and yeah yeah they were it was a transformative experience for me as well i did it did allow me to hone in on some of those driving techniques that i wasn't really aware of much before of that because my gear wasn't really it didn't really lend itself to those things so the trail breaking and threshold breaking and those kinds of things yeah once i was onto these i was able to dial them in to really hone in those skills yeah um so yeah it was a a good experience jumping up to those um they're really nice refined um set of pedals yeah they feel solid the bump stops feel nice and solid yeah yeah it was a good experience yeah i agree with the dampening kit i tried to dial it out as much as i could i didn't like it yeah i think almost detrimental yeah i agree so look in terms of other hardware as well just one other thing we should call out here as well as the little vibration motors that we have on the back of the throttle like that and the brake here yeah look i i honestly for me it's a bit of a take it'll leave it thing it is a very very subjective thing i think objectively the only the only criticism i really have of this and i think there are third-party software packages available now which can actually you know manage this a little bit better so maybe that's actually a good video to make but um when i was driving with these as my daily driver back then the fanatex software basically kicked in the motors for abs based on a pressure so as soon as you were hitting a certain force the motor would start spinning now obviously in a real-life race car maybe it isn't obvious but in a real-life race car when or any car the point where the abs kicks in isn't going to be the same every time yeah it's you know based off the types of tires that you've got on tyre temperature surface temperature surface texture wetness you know all these things so there are scenarios there where you could actually be getting misinformation you could actually be getting information which is detrimental to understanding what's going on with the car rather than actually helping you drive yeah you definitely need to dial it into each car make sure you've got it set up right but once you have it's quite helpful and that's one of the parts that made it really good for me to learn how to threshold brake properly because it was a nice distinctive so kind of like as a training tool kind of yeah exactly and you also had a butt kicker when you that's true yeah i mean i just thinking back to when i moved across to my housing the ultimate pedals from these which was the next upgrade i did and actually had somebody ask me after a couple of months how did you find not having the vibration motors anymore and i kind of went oh yeah like i hadn't even given it a thought because that's how much i didn't care yeah but you know again it is it is a subjective thing but objectively we do need to call out the fact that you know it does work in a certain way and you know it is what it is but it is one thing that you have with the v3 pedals that you don't have on the csl pedal so it's an important thing to note but yeah look they are in a different price bracket completely there you know almost double the price and i think you are getting value for there i guess what i'm mulling over in my mind here is you know if i had the choice between spending you know if i have if i have 400 us dollars and i have the choice between buying this and maybe a secondhand butt kicker or something like that yeah or just buying this which would i do that is a tough one it's a really tough one i feel like ultimately you could learn to be as fast with these as you could be with these so if that's the most important thing to you then maybe that would be the better option but these look much nicer on the rig they have that kind of yeah feeling they're more sporty yeah i hate that word but yes i know that's why i used it yeah but no i i do agree with you this is something that i would have more pride in on having on my rig than these yeah definitely even though objectively these probably aren't twice the pedals that these are yeah i think for me the big thing for these is the bump stop feel yep it really is so much more solid feeling than those yeah and you've got that nice two-stage clutch feeling as well it's quite good it is a really outstandingly well refined product i think other than the screws in the base plate here which are made of cheese yeah it isn't it isn't without its faults we do have the cheese screws in the front here to take off the base plate a lot of people also had problems removing the grub screw to install the performance kit too so okay yeah you know it's not perfect but it is a really nice product overall so i think that pretty much covers everything's in terms of the big questions so let's just quickly run through uh all the key questions once more for you guys who might be skipping right to the end of the video so csl pedals with load cell kit on their own thumbs up yeah absolutely yeah i think i guess the best way i can sum it up is even if they cost 20 30 maybe more than they do i'd still think they were pretty good value yeah so other than i would i would definitely want adjustability if it was gonna cost that much more but i do feel like they could charge more than they have for these pedals and they'd still be pretty good value yep especially just judging by what they feel like under your feet yeah going by that feeling alone that sensation they do feel more expensive than they are yep i would 100 agree with that so in their own right definitely a thumbs up there uh comparing to the csl elite pedals with load cell oh it's a side step isn't it if you've got these don't change if you gonna get those don't worry about these exactly yeah it's it's not yeah it's definitely not one of those scenarios where you go oh if only i'd known then yeah it's yeah and while it's got adjustability in there it's not how many times have you adjusted it never yeah yeah we just kind of we set it we set it to the maximum stiffness and then never looked at it again right so yeah that's that uh okay so csl pedals versus the tlcm pedals which are probably the closest witcher is available on the market right now in terms of what they look like on paper at least so uh yeah what did you think about that absolute no-brainer yeah the thrustmasters were pretty bad yeah i think that these these really do walk all over the thrust masters i think again objectively the only compelling reason that i can think well two compelling reasons that i can think of to maybe consider the tlcm pedals over the csl pedals is if you're already invested in a thrustmaster ecosystem you want to keep everything within the same ecosystem then maybe i still think the driving experience is is superior enough on these that i would probably just plug them in via usb anyway so really that just boils down to people that are on a console and need to kind of stick within the same ecosystem for that reason that's true yeah only other compelling reason i can think of is you are going to have a hard time driving with the load cell on carpet or on a tile floor if you don't have some way of fixing these to your chair so you're not moving obviously that is something that is extremely important to the driving experience and something that shouldn't be overlooked because you don't need to push as hard on the tlcm pedals to max them out even though they do have the heavier load selling them uh i you could drive with these even at the maximum setting without them sliding around on most floors whereas you are going to have a hard time with the csl pedals do the same thing so it's not hard to put them on a plank of wood or get some bricks out it's not but not everybody has the tools or the knowledge to do even you know basic things like that a lot of people just want an out of the box experience that's definitely worth figuring it out though yeah yeah i mean look these are definitely a superior product yeah yeah i'm interested to hear from you guys that do have tlcm pedals what your experience has been like with them i mean i know you know up until now they've really been the only load cell pedals other than you know the aftermarket load sell upgrades that you can buy for more entry-level pedals that were really kind of in that price bracket so it really wasn't a whole lot to compare them to but i really do feel like these are very much superior so yeah how do you feel about tlcm pedals you guys that are watching have you had a good experience with them would you kind of agree with our observations i mean obviously we are a little bit spoilt with some of the more high-end stuff that we've experienced but you know comparing these to that yeah i mean on paper you you're really comparing the thrust masters to to these uh but under your foot you're comparing them to the logitech exactly or something like that that's not what they feel like yeah i just i mean again we've already talked about it in more detail earlier on in the video so if you want to you know nut it out more go check that out but yeah ultimately these are definitely the superior pedals in my opinion and yes you agree so then just quickly recapping on versus v3 pedals more expensive more refined definitely an upgrade but whether or not it's worth it pretty much subjective personally for me i think there is a strong argument for buying these pedals and spending the extra money on something else yep but if you've already got these and you're a bit bummed that they brought these out and you think oh i could have just got those be happy with these because there's a big improvement you've got adjustability you've got the ability to add on the damper kit if you wish to do so even though we don't recommend it you have the abs modules the vibration motors uh yeah they are a better set of pedals overall so that's that so i think that's it guys let us know if you have any questions down below and if you do want to pick up a set of these pedals or any of the other products that you've seen other than the csl elite load cell because you can't buy that anymore but uh yeah any of these including the thrust master stuff as well if you want to pick up any of this stuff we do have some links down in the description below which help out the channel as well so thank you very much for your support there but above all as always thank you very much for watching let us know what you think down in the comments below leave a thumbs up if you've enjoyed the video and check out some of our other pedal review videos as well we do have an abundance of them we feel like we've kind of been doing a lot of pedal reviews like we need to lay them all out on the table and go through them all one day kind of like what we did with the wheels recently yeah yeah you found it'd be interesting yeah see whether we really do get a uh you know a 10 times the experience out of a set of pedals that cost 10 times as much yeah i think it'd be a good video yeah all right let us know what you think guys we'll see you again soon see ya bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 72,037

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Id: wuxSJDfcCBQ

Length: 62min 6sec (3726 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Saneless]

Thanks for the thorough review and comparisons between others

[u/circa86]

Truly the best reviews. Great stuff Will!

One trick I found with my CSL Elites is to cut the foam spacer in half and one of the firm urethane pieces in half to cut the take up feel in the brake by half.

I like having a balance between race car pedals and street car brake feel so that was a good compromise for those. And easy to swap back in the full foam piece if you wanted more of a street car feel again.

[u/Healthy_Yesterday_84]

Dam I'm not one to spend extra for aesthetics but those upgraded pedals are pretty fire.