REVIEW - Heusinkveld Sprint Load Cell Sim Racing Pedals

hey guys will here now we've reviewed an awful lot of pedals here at boosted media over the years but one of the pedal sets that has been most hotly requested by you guys is the housting felt sprint pedals now that is exactly what we have in front of us today we've got the red line edition which has a couple of little cosmetic changes over the standard edition and i'll take you through exactly what those are as part of today's video but today we're going to go through these pedals in detail as we always do and by the end of the video you should have a good idea of whether the houston vault sprints and racing pedals are the right choice for your sim rig so let's get started [Music] okay now we wouldn't normally include unboxing as part of a pedal review simply because they normally just come in a pretty plain box but houston belt do take a lot of pride in the presentation of their gear so what i thought we'd do here is do a bit of an unboxing while we're covering off a couple of housekeeping things and talking about pricing and things like that so we do need to say a big thank you to houstonville for sending these pedals across to us to check out now we don't have any sort of financial relationship with them there are some affiliate links down in the description below for some of their resellers so you can help support the channel by purchasing the pedals through some of those but no direct financial relationship with houstonville at all so just want to make that clear but thank you very much to them for sending them across for today's review i've already just slit the uh the factory seal there just to make it a little bit easier for me when i'm opening them up but they did come factory sealed so one of the things you'll notice with using velt products is that pretty much all of their packaging is entirely recyclable which is really great so we've got a little envelope here with the documentation there's a few stickers here and you can see straight away just the quality that you're getting here they obviously take a lot of pride in their presentation we had this with the ultimate plus pedals which we reviewed a little while back so i was expecting a similar experience with the sprints but obviously being a cheaper product i wasn't sure so a nice little card there thank you for your purchase and a really detailed instruction manual as well so i'm going to just quickly give you a skim through this we will reference this a few times throughout the review now the reason i want to call this out because this is so well written now it covers off everything you need to know to set up the pedals and the thing that i love about it is that it really gives you a strong sense of confidence when you're setting up the pedals one of the things that can be quite daunting about sim racing pedals there's so many different options in terms of how you can calibrate them how you can adjust them and if you haven't had high end pedals before you kind of have no idea what you're doing to begin with and that's normal and it can all be a little bit overwhelming so what this does is it takes you through all the various different adjustments everything that you need to know and it does a really good job of explaining how those adjustments actually influence what you feel in your feet as well so it really gives you a lot more confidence in setting up the pedals and you can see as we glance through here everything's really well laid out everything's very clear nice plain english as well and yeah there's absolutely no issues at all following this through we will reference this a few times throughout the review video as we go through things so next up we have a little cardboard box with our accessories so let's have a quick look inside there too we've got our usb a to b cable there we've got a whole bunch of mounting hardware that's something that is quite rare to see included there's a bunch of tools here as well for making various adjustments and then we've got an allen key in there too and then you can see an assortment inside the box of various different elastomers and plastic spaces which we'll explore a little later on too so let's chuck this stuff back in the box for now and let's get on to the main event so what we have here is the three pedal set we'll lift the cover off this now now the three pedal set comes in at 577.69 euro there is a two pedal set version available too of course which doesn't include the clutch and these days with so many cars having sequential gearboxes in particular the mx-5 and i-racing moved across to sequential about six or seven months ago now and a lot of people actually abandoned their clutch pedals because that was the only car they were ever driving that actually required it so it is worth considering the two pedal set you don't necessarily need a clutch pedal these days but just for reference here three pedal set is 577.69 the two pedal set is 495.04 so straight away again i can see just as we had with the ultimate plus pedals these are absolutely beautifully presented they just immediately strike you as a really really well refined really high-end set of pedals which again i wasn't really sure what to expect because the ultimates are so much more expensive than the sprints are but these are absolutely in every way presented as nicely and you know the material quality is just as good obviously there are some significant differences between these and the ultimates and that's something that we'll definitely explore in today's video but you can see the beautiful cnc laser cut steel that they've used here all the edges are really really nicely cut unlike some of the pressed metal pedals that we've seen in the past where they actually have like a stamping tool that cuts the steel so the raw aluminium surfaces here are all bead blasted so kind of like sandblasting it gives it a bit of a textured surface gives you a little bit more grip on the pedal pads as well and that's one thing that i absolutely loved about the ultimate plus pedals which we reviewed recently so you know really nice presentation there you can see the pedal arm and the remainder of the cage is all powder coated now the powder coating does vary slightly between the standard sprint pedals and the team redline edition here but that is purely just a cosmetic difference you can see we also have the team redline etching here on the faceplate so that is actually laser cut in there the houstonvelt logo two and then if we flip the pedals around you can see the team redline version has a beautiful red spring there as well so personal preference thing i actually think that looks really classy it matches the boosted media colors as well which is a nice little bonus and then you can see the same kind of deal with our brake pedal and our clutch as well so quickly before we move on to the base plate pricing for the team redline version is a little bit more expensive so three pedal set is 660 33 the two pedal set is 552.89 the base plate is 1908 so 750 41 in total for the complete three pedal set with the base plate for the team redline version as opposed to 650 124 for the standard sprints so let's have a quick look at the base plate too this is an optional accessory so you don't necessarily need to purchase this to mount the pedals onto your rig obviously it will depend on the type of rig you have but we'll take you through all the mounting options and measurements a little bit later on in the review so let's pop the cover off this guy get the box opened up and again we've got a really detailed instruction manual here which you might not expect for something as simple as a base plate but you can see they've got all the measurements in here all the various different mounting options and everything you could possibly want to know to get your pedals mounted up with absolute 100 confidence which is again very very good so we've got a bead blasted heel plate here and again you can see the housing velt and team redline branding there that is what looks to be printed rather yeah that's definitely some sort of printing or screen printing or something like that rather than laser etched so it's not recessed at all it's nice and smooth that means you're not going to feel any texture there if you are driving with socks or bare feet which is important to some people so i'm sure that's the reason why they've gone with that lift up the next layer we've got a black powder coated heavy piece of steel here which is going to sit at the rear and then we've got two additional brackets here too and that i think is everything that we have inside the box other than just a little bit of mounting hardware once again there we go so we've got some washes and we've got a few little standoffs bolts and bits and pieces like that so again everything you're going to need to mount the pedals to the base plate and then also mount the base plate to your rig obviously dependent on the type of rig you have so they can't account for every single type of rig that's out there but chances are what you have here should work so let's set the box aside and i think what we'll do here is take a look at each individual pedal then we'll cover off mounting and the base plate then we'll take a detailed look at the smart control software too because that is a really great feature of housing belt pedals and then we'll get into the driving experience and wrap it all up with our conclusions so let's take some time now to look at some of the design elements which are uniform across all three pedals talk a little bit about adjustment there too and then we'll talk about each individual pedal in more detail so one of the most interesting things about this pedal and thing i want to talk about first is the fact that all three pedals are actually utilizing load cells and that is quite unusual for sim racing pedals obviously we see a lot of load cells used for brake pedals but for the throttle and clutch usually we see either a hall effect sensor or potentiometer used now hall effect sensors have the advantage of not having any moving parts so what's actually happening is you're measuring the deflection of electrons across a metal plate using a magnet to vary that amount of deflection and that is what's interpreted in your sim as a as a value so in the case of a hall effect sensor you don't have any mechanical moving parts which means there's nothing to wear and tear over time now potentiometer or as they're sometimes referred to a variable resistor essentially achieves the same result but it does so by varying the resistance within a circuit now this can be achieved in a couple of different ways we've seen the use of linear as well as rotary potentiometers in various different sim racing pedals but all of them rely on mechanical moving parts and that does mean that those parts will inevitably wear and tear over time now many pedals do use automotive grade potential i'm the same as what you'd find in say a throttle position sensor and so in those cases it's really not an issue at all but on cheaper pedals often you do see an open kind of circuit design which does lend itself to taking in dirt debris moisture and all those kinds of things that can wear and tear over time obviously any wear and tear is going to impact the way the value is interpreted and that will affect things like muscle memory when you're driving now a load cell works a little bit differently a lot of people will sort of wonder well how can you measure something that is position based like a throttle or a clutch input using something that is measuring force so the way this is actually done it's quite clever you can see the little load cell in the bottom here so the rear half of this little assembly here is actually hard mounted to the enclosure itself so it doesn't move in relation to the pedal as you push the pedal down now what happens is as you push the pedal down the little spring in there compresses that puts force on the front half of our load cell here you can actually see if you have a look there there's some little cutouts here so what's happening is that load cell actually deflects as you can see there and as that load cell deflects there front to rear that deflection is actually what's measured as an input so you can imagine as you push the pedal down the spring is deflecting the load cell and that is what creates our measurement inside the game so i don't know the exact value in terms of how much force these load cells that you're using on the throttle and the clutch can handle but you can imagine they would be very very sensitive because they're not actually you know they're not measuring the amount of force that you're putting on the pedal they're simply just measuring the position of the pedal based on the amount of force that's being exerted via the spring which is connected so hopefully that makes sense but it's the exact same design there in terms of how the load cell is implemented between the throttle and if you flip over the clutch pedal you can see that works in exactly the same way actually that gives you a better look you can see the spring in the front there and as that pedal pushes down the spring compresses puts some force on the load cell and then that deflection in the load cell is what is measured as your clutch input now in the case of the brake it does look very similar you can see the load cell underneath here but the way this actually operates and the way it's connected mechanically to the pedal is completely different and we'll explore that when we look at the load cell setup in more detail a little bit later on in the video so the majority of the construction is stainless steel but they have used rubbers and plastics throughout here to reduce metal to metal contact make sure that things can move freely without you know scraping and things like that but that's something that we'll dive into more in more detail on each pedal as we go too so stainless steel pretty much throughout and they're using a mixture of two millimeter and three millimeter thick stainless for the construction depending on the part that you're looking at so you'll notice here on the throttle the pedal arm or the pedal upright is three millimeter thick steel the cage around the bottom is two millimeter thick where it doesn't need to be quite as strong but then the mounting surface itself where it actually bolts to your rig is three millimeter steel that was upgraded in more recent revisions of the sprint pedals previously i believe it was two millimeter thick uh clutch is pretty much the same so again we've got three millimeter thick here the pedal faces across all three are two millimeter thick you'll see two millimeter thick for these parts down here that don't need to be as strong and then three millimeters thick for the mounting surface just as we had before and with the brake we've got three millimeter pretty much entirely throughout here so the only exception being just this area down here everything else so all around the back here and the pedal arms the mounting surfaces are all three millimeter thick so they obviously put a lot of thought into making sure that the pedals are as strong as they need to be where they need to be but not wasting any material where they don't need to do so and obviously we'll talk about flex and anything like that once we've got them up on the rig a little bit later on in the video now one of the things that i do want to spend quite a bit of time on today is adjustment because one of the key features in my mind of these sprint pedals is just the sheer amount of adjustability they do have to suit pretty much any kind of driving style that you can imagine in any sort of personal preference and subjectivity as well so there are a couple of adjustments which are universal across all three pedals we'll look at those now and then we'll look at the individual adjustments as we take a deeper dive into each of the pedals so first adjustment you'll notice here and this is a new thing to the sprint pedals as of about a year ago i believe so now you can see we've got holes up and down the mounting surfaces and that is the same across all three petals that allows us to adjust the angle of our pedals from leaning back like we have here in the minimum position to leaning forward like that in the maximum position so you can see there's a big nice scope of adjustment there and to make that adjustment now all you need to do is just remove the bolts on both sides here so these two guys same across all three pedals and then you just slide the entire assembly forward and back obviously it's going to be pivoting in the front here and that will allow the entire mechanism to move forward and back like so now the other adjustment that we have available across all three pedals is the ability to raise or lower the pedal pad by 20 millimeters so the way you do that is grab your little included torx key and spanner put the spanner on the little nut on the back here so just this guy here and then what we do is we pop it out rotate it around like so and then slot it back in and tighten it up again now you can see that hole is offset so now that pedal pad is actually sitting 20 millimeters low than it did in the previous orientation and that is the same across all three pedals so you'll notice in the front of each of the three pedals we've got exactly the same design in terms of the pivot point so there's a nice little bearing system in each side that should avoid any squeaks or anything like that you can lubricate these pedals with ptfe lubricant they actually have a suggested inside the manual to actually picture exactly the stuff that they recommend that you buy which is wd-40 there we go dry ptfe lubricant so it's great that they give you that level of detail tell you exactly what you need to purchase to lubricate you can see anywhere that we've got moving parts we've either got metal bearing systems or some sort of a rubber or plastic bushing to make sure that we don't have any metal to metal contact so yeah that's one of the things that does really impress me about houston got pedals particularly is that they've obviously spent a lot of time refining their design in terms of the materials that they're using throughout and that is definitely one of the things that differentiates their pedals from other pedals which may look very similar but don't necessarily carry the same quality and that is one thing that really jumps out at me looking at these pedals even though they might look quite similar to a lot of other pedals that you might have seen on the market just the attention to detail the level of refinement and i guess it goes to show how these products have evolved over time at houstonville they've obviously listened to feedback over the years and made some small revisions that have all added up to give us a quality product like this that looks as well refined as it does so before moving on to the individual pedals one last thing to talk about here is electronics so you'll notice the clutch and the throttle both have a rj9 connection here that plugs into a connector on our brake pedal so you can see a pcb sitting underneath here that has a couple of rj9 sockets one on each side for our throttle and our clutch and then obviously the load cell connection for the brake is all part of that assembly too now you may be wondering about the open style design here the electronics for a couple of different reasons so they do tell me and it says in their literature that the electronics are ecc compliant and tested so we shouldn't have any issues with electromagnetic interference that's definitely something that we will have a look at when we get up and driving in just a minute but one thing to keep in mind is that we haven't actually ever run into any issues with electromagnetic interference on anything that we've tested at boosted media so just because we don't have issues doesn't necessarily mean you won't but you know they do say that it has been tested so you shouldn't have any problems there but just as a point of difference here if you compare that to what you get with the smart control module which is standalone on the ultimate plus pedals that actually does come in its own encased metal housing there which you know from a design perspective is better but again given the point that these are tested there shouldn't be any issues there now the other thing you might be wondering about here is with an open design like this does it lend itself to becoming damaged or shorting out over time obviously pedals do get pretty dirty anybody that's had pedals on their rig for any length of time would know just how much crap they can accumulate now i was a little bit concerned about that i thought it looked a little bit strange when i first looked at it but then i noticed and again we'll overlay some b-roll here so you can see for yourselves what they've done is they've actually coated the entire front surface of the pcb with some sort of epoxy resin or something like that and that is essentially insulating all the components that are sitting on top of the pcb and stopping them from being vulnerable to any metal filings or any moisture that might fall down on top of it so definitely a good thing to see there it's not going to stop metal filings and things from working their way into the connections but that shouldn't be an issue once the plugs are in place anyway but if you have run into any issues when it comes to moisture or metal filings interfering with the circuitry on your pedals do definitely let us know in the comments down below because it's not something that we can really test extensively you know in the context of a review video like this so definitely let us know in the comments but yeah it's nice to see that they've kept everything nice and compact it's no bigger than it needs to be and as you'll see a little later on the video when we get into the software side of things the way this is integrated is really really powerful there's a lot of great things that you can do in their software which isn't available on many other pedals on the market so that's definitely something that we'll dive into in more detail but speaking of diving into things let's take a more detailed look at the throttle pedal here there's not a whole lot of complexity to it even though it does look quite complex at face value so as you saw before we do have that little load cell in the bottom there and as we explain as you push the pedal down there's a little spring which puts force on the front half of the load cell and that is what essentially is measured as our throttle position inside the game we've got our mounting brackets here as you saw before we have the angle adjustment up and down which allows you to tilt the angle of the pedals then we also have three additional adjustments here for pedal travel pedal force and pedal spring preload so very very simple design as we push the pedal down we've got a preloaded spring here which compresses and that is what provides the mechanical force that's fighting against you as you push down the pedal so a couple of quick things that i want to highlight here is just the choice of materials throughout so as we mentioned before we've got stainless steel pretty much for everything that you see that is metal and we do have little plastic bushes for any of the moving parts so that we don't get metal to metal contact or squeaking we've got a bearing mechanism here for our pivot and then if we spin it around you'll notice a little plastic or delrin i think it's delrin spring perch on the top here as well as another perch on the bottom which has an integrated sleeve for the shaft to pass through so as we push down on the pedal you can see the shaft actually move that cable out of the way for you you can see that shaft goes through the sleeve there and it looks like there is a little bit of ptfe lubricant just on that part there i can see through the gaps in the spring so very simple design but perfectly smooth there and again we'll comment on that when we go for a drive but very very smooth operation there there's no binding there's no gripping there's no sort of noise or anything like that in there as we would expect from a design like this and again i just want to draw attention to the fact that they are using appropriate materials for all of the parts where it's necessary now you'll also notice down in the bottom here too we've got a little rubber sleeve sitting over our bump stop so what that means is that when we push the pedal all the way down to its maximum we're not getting any metal to metal contact it's pushing up against that rubber sleeve there so we don't get any noise on maximum and then if we flip the pedal around you can see a similar design for the bump stop on the return too so you can see the metal arms there up against the metal here but there's a little rubber bump stop there which eliminates any noise at all so look that is pretty much it in terms of the design elements of this so let's have a look at adjustments now so as mentioned previously in addition to the angle and height adjustment which we already took a look at across all three pedals we also have the ability to adjust our pedal travel our pedal force and our pedal spring preload and again i want to highlight just how detailed the instruction manual is when it comes to adjustments you can see there illustrations for adjusting the pedal plates as we saw before but very very very detailed instructions explaining exactly how to not only adjust each each thing that can be adjusted but also explaining exactly what the impact of that adjustment is as you do it so you know exactly what you're doing and what impact it has so you can see even down to here where we're talking about pedal force you can see in pounds and kilograms exactly what the difference is going to make relative to travel and so forth so yeah really really really detailed instructions which again as i said before just gives you that element of confidence when you're making adjustments you know what you're getting yourself into and you know what the likely outcome is going to be and you know that can save you a lot of time as well because it means rather than kind of guessing you can go okay well i like quite a stiff pedal i like to have a lot of travel what exactly do i need to do to achieve that you just go to the instructions that will basically tell you exactly what you need to do to achieve the kind of feel that you're looking for so it's going to save a lot of fiddling around and i personally just really appreciate the effort that they've put into this instruction manual so let's start off by having a look at our pedal what do you want to look at first let's go back one start off by having a look at pedal travel so as we mentioned before we've got that little rubber bump stop which sits down in the bottom here now by default that comes in position number three of five meaning that you can go two steps either further or two steps less than what we have by default so it's a middle position so all you would need to do is just remove the bolt on both sides and then slide that sleeve up or down and that is going to increase the travel so you can imagine as you push the pedal down the further you move it that way the further the pedal is going to travel down the further you move it in the opposite direction the less travel you're going to have in that pedal and it's as simple as that now you'll also notice a little slot here which gives us adjustment for our pedal force curve and i'm going to read out exactly the way they describe this so it says in the arm of the throttle pedal you'll find an adjustment to mainly change the slope of the pedal force curve in the highest position you'll need more force to reach the end of pedal travel compared to the lower setting it also slightly raises the overall amount of force required so the adjustment is made as follows loosen do not remove the nut on the adjustment bolt slide the adjustment bolt to the desired position if it's difficult to slide you may need to loosen the lower hex spacer in the pedal arm and then re-tighten the nut so all we need to do is just loosen this and if we move it up it's going to require more force to reach the bump stop if we move it down it's going to require less force to reach the bump stop and again having a quick look at the manual you can see they include a nice little chart here so at the maximum setting which is the top line here at 100 travel we're looking at around about 33 34 pounds of force and you can see how that goes up in a linear fashion for the mid-level we're looking at around 22 pounds or 10 kilograms and the lowest setting we're looking at just over 12 pounds pretty much bang on six kilograms so quite a lot of variation there in terms of feel and that is not even accounting for the pre-load adjustment which we'll look at in just a moment so that is our pedal force curve now let's have a look at preload so i'm going to flip over to the next page again and let's see what they have to say about this so it says next to the spring you'll find an adjustment to change the spring preload so that means this little part just here by making the spring length in the rest position shorter or longer you change the initial amount of force required to move the pedal the slope of the force curve will remain identical and it says caution because the spring length in the rest position is affected by the pedal force curve settings not all preload settings work in conjunction with all pedal force curve settings strictly adhere to the maximum and minimum spring length recommendations as set out later in this paragraph otherwise damage to your pedal may occur so it's great that they let you know that as well so you're not going to do anything that might potentially cause damage and just to elaborate on that what it says is that in the fully compressed position so with the pedal pushed all the way down the spring length should never be less than 40 millimeters so if you do end up with a spring that's less than that you'll need to back it off a little bit make some other adjustments to make sure that you're staying within those tolerances so to actually make the adjustment to the preload all you need to do is grab the included spanner back off the little retainer nut here now the retainer nut is really important you do want to make sure that you cinch that up when you're done simply because if you don't the threads won't be bound and what can happen is this can adjust itself as you're driving and obviously you don't want to have things changing while you're driving that's something that we'll talk about a little bit more in relation to the brake pedal a bit later on in this video so we've released that off now all we need to do is just rotate the collar obviously winding it down the thread will increase the preload because we're compressing the spring backing it off in the other direction will loosen the preload now the other little observation that i had here again just highlights the attention to detail is if we wind out our spring perch here or our little collar we actually get to the point where we can't wind it any further because we're hitting these bump stops before the spring actually becomes non-captive so even in the worst case where this did work its way loose it's never going to get to the point where the spring starts just sort of freely rattling around inside its perch here so i'm going to wind that back now to pretty much where it was and i probably should have put a little mark there so i know where it was by default but it was about there and then we're going to lock down our little a nut cinch that up so it can't move and our preload adjustment is as simple as that just remember again when you push the spring all the way down to its maximum compression it does need to be longer than 40 millimeters so i think that covers pretty much everything we need to look at in terms of the throttle for now we'll look at mounting when we get up and running with the with the pedal plate a little bit later on but just to recap quickly again we have angle adjustment on the back here we can adjust the pedal plate up and down by 20 millimeters we also have adjustments for pedal travel pedal force and pedal spring preload so pretty much everything you're going to need there to achieve the feeling that you want one thing you will notice here though is that we don't have any sort of hydraulic dampening so all that we have here in terms of mechanical resistance is purely just that spring and that is it now whether or not that has a large impact that will be very much down to subjectivity for me personally you would have heard me say this in a lot of other review videos of pedals i don't really feel a massive amount of advantage with hydraulic damper on the throttle pedal it does feel nice on the ultimate plus pedals i'm not going to deny that but i think it's a kind of take it or leave it thing for me and i think most people would probably agree with me but again let me know down in the comments what you guys think if you do have pedals with a hydraulic dampener in the throttle what do you think was it worth it or would you maybe not bother spending the extra money if you had your time again let us know let's move on to the uh clutch pedal next i think that is most similar to the throttle and then we'll take a detailed look at the brake now this looks very similar to the throttle pedal at face value but there are a couple of really important differences here so fundamentally works very much the same way you can see it's got the same load cell that we looked at before measuring the amount of deflection in the pedal based on the spring pressure down at the bottom here so as you push down on the pedal the spring compresses and it moves the little load cell that is interpreted as your clutch position inside the game and we've got the same angle adjustment here the same pedal plate adjustment with a 20 millimeter difference between maximum and minimum same bearing in the front here and again same fundamental design elements here with plastic bushes rubber inserts and bump stops everywhere that you would want them to be now the first thing that you will notice here is that we don't have a pedal throw adjustment like what we had with our throttle pedal so we can't adjust the amount of forward or back movement that we have we do still have a little rubber bump stop here sitting on the top of this arm so as we push the pedal all the way down to the maximum which i'm probably not going to be able to do on the table here so i'm not even going to try we are going to get contact between the metal arms here and the rubber bump stop which will mean that the operation should be pretty much silent and again we'll show you that we're up and running on the rig and if we look on the underside again even though it looks a little bit different from what we had on the throttle there's a nice little rubber bump stop under there and that provides a nice cushioned landing when our pedal returns back to zero and it should be pretty much silent we'll check it obviously once we're up and running on the rig so a couple of obvious differences there between the two now the biggest difference mechanically is that when we push down on our clutch pedal we have this kind of two-stage effect going on so as we push it down you can see i'm probably not going to be able to do it but we'll try i'll try to go this way maybe so as i push the pedal down you can see that arm at the back there it's actually really stiff as we push that down that arm kind of rotates up and what that gives us is a kind of two-stage effect to simulate the bite point in a real-life clutch so in a real car when you push the clutch pedal down there's a point where the clutch plates actually start to engage with the flywheel on the car and that is the point where the engine becomes mechanically connected to the gearbox and starts to drive the wheels now if we flip our instruction manual through here and have a look at the adjustment here you can see again they've given us a really nice chart here which explains exactly how this works so you can see the force goes up in a linear fashion and then as we reach that point it suddenly jumps across and the force required actually becomes a lot less so the maximum amount of force required to push the pedal is actually around about sixty to seventy percent deflection and that simulates the point where you would have the clutch plates engaging in a real car and you can obviously adjust that as we saw before with the throttle between about eight pounds or four kilograms and up to a maximum of around about 20 22 pounds or 10 kilograms and then it tapers off as it gets to the top here now we do have some adjustment available for that and it works pretty much exactly the same way as we saw before with our throttle pedal although rather than it being a slot there's three individual holes here and it comes by default on the middle now one important thing to note here is if you are going to be adjusting that there is quite a bit of preload on the clutch spring here so what you'll need to do is back that off loosen off your retainer as well as the spring perch and you want to back that off all the way until there's no preload on the spring because you can imagine once you undo the fixture here if there's tension on that spring the whole thing is going to kind of shoot that way and you could end up bending things or damaging things or hurting yourself so make sure you back off any preload on that spring before you make any adjustments there but fundamentally very similar to the way the throttle pedal is adjusted and again refer to the manual for the full details on exactly what is going to influence what in terms of adjustment there and then of course we also have the preload adjustment on the spring itself now there are a couple of things here to take note of just like what we have with the throttle pedal so again it says next to the spring you'll find the adjustment to change the spring preload by making the spring length in the rest position shorter or longer you change the initial amount of force required to move the pedal exactly the same as the throttle the slope of the force curve will remain identical now again just like we had with the throttle pedal we do have a caution here because the spring length in the rest position is affected by the pedal force curve settings not all preload settings will work in conjunction with all pedal force curve settings strictly adhere to the minimum spring length recommendations as set out later in this paragraph otherwise damage to your pedals may occur so that is all the adjustment that's available on the clutch let's move on now to the brake so let's take a more detailed look at the brake pedal now so same angle adjustment as we saw before same pedal pad adjustment up and down by 20 millimeters and as we mentioned before we do have all the electronics for the entire system all enclosed in the back here with a epoxy resin coating over them so that they don't become damaged by any sort of metal filings anything conductive that may drop down inside there over time so what we have on the bottom here you can see is a 120 kilogram load cell now the important thing that i really want you guys to understand here is that this is designed fundamentally differently to a lot of the other load cell pedals that you might have seen now we did a review video just the other day on the acertec forte load cell pedals now they position the load cell directly behind the pushrod i guess you could call it so that when you're pushing down on the pedal face all that force is going directly down into the load cell in a i guess linear fashion you could describe it so what you need to understand here is what's happening is as you push down the pedal this entire back section is actually moving down and it actually pivots around this point here so pedals are fixed to your rig from here as you push the pedal down this entire assembly pushes down it pivots around this point here and then you can see the back half of the load cell is bolted to this area here so it can't move the front half of the load cell is actually a part of this assembly which is pivoting around this point here so as this half moves relative to this half you get deflection in the 120 kilogram load cell here and that is what is interpreted as breaking force inside the game so the result of that is that even though it's a 120 kilogram load cell the maximum amount of actual breaking force which it can measure is 143 pounds or 65 kilograms of force so there's a couple of other important changes that you may have noticed if you own older sprint pedals and these are uniform across the upgraded sprint pedals as well as of course the team redline version which we have here now i'm going to read this directly from the review notes that they've sent me just so i get it exactly right and then we'll elaborate on it a little bit more as we go in and have a final look at exactly how this works so what they've said to me here is houston felt progressive elastomers brake rubbers are now installed on the sprints in summer 2021 we released our sim pedal ultimate plus which we reviewed back then which feature our new progressive brake elastomers or brake rubbers this is a houstonville proprietary development which has now also been applied to our sprint product line the key benefit of these elastomers is they provide a highly progressive brake feel which is typical of what you would experience in real cars after a soft initial feeling the resistance of the brake pedal will sharply increase as the load on the brake is increased on the stiffer setting this will result in a brake pedal which turns extremely hard as you increase load but also on softer settings there is a very clear progressive feel in the pedal now this is where it gets interesting so it says we achieve this feeling without having to artificially restrict the expansion of the rubber using cups or an enclosed chamber which is a method which is sometimes used by other brands since brake setups of real race cars vary greatly from very soft to extremely stiff we supply elastomers of various lengths and harnesses for a total of six possible brake resistance settings the specification of each rubber is marked on the rubber itself and then it goes on to explain force graphs and stuff which we'll have a look at in the manual in just a minute now the reason i read all that out is because this is something that we've experienced with the ultimate plus pedals when we reviewed them and this is a really important point of difference when compared to some of the other load cell pedals on the market so with the original ultimate pedals which i had which were i think a first generation actually purchased them second hand we did actually have a couple of blowouts and failures when it came to the elastomers now what i mean by that is as you push the pedal down the rubber actually compresses it's basically like a rubber spring and if you push the pedal down past the point of maximum tolerance in terms of deflection then over time that is going to wear down it's going to get softer and ultimately it will break apart and that is something that we did experience with the original ultimate pedals so i'm going to grab a couple of other pedal sets and put them on the table here so we can do a bit of a comparison so i'm going to grab the bj sim racing pedals we'll put them on this side like that i'm going to spin this guy around so you can see it like for like and i'm also going to grab the mecha cup one load cell pedal so that is this guy and you can see this is a perfect example of the metal cup style system which was referred to in houston vault's review notes so with the bj sim racing pedals we have had multiple elastomer failures both on the load cell and the hydraulic version of the pedals which is also sitting behind me but basically what happens is you can see here as we push the pedal down there's nothing here to restrict the movement of those elastomers so if the elastomers aren't designed with that in mind then inevitably they're going to break down and you know either become softer or just fall apart completely as was our experience with the bj petals now with the mecha cup 1 petals you'll notice these little metal cups here so what happens is as we push the petal down we reach a certain point where those cups actually interface with each other so they start to push into each other and that limits the maximum amount of deflection which is available to the elastomers so you can imagine they will compress up to a point and again we'll overlay some footage here from our review of the mecha cup1 pedal so you can see exactly what we're talking about but you push that down the metal cups touch each other and then those elastomers can't expand or balloon out anywhere past that point and we did find the mecha cut one petals which i ran on my rig for about two to three months were completely reliable we didn't have any issues at all when it came to elastomer failure now it also made reference to a metal sleeve or a metal chamber i think it was a word it used design so if we pull up the acertec forte petals so you can see here what they're referring to as a chamber now we went into this in a huge amount of detail in our first look video of these forte petals just a couple of weeks ago now so definitely check that video out if you want to really sort of get into exactly how this works but just to give you a top level explanation we've got an elastomer which actually sits inside here so i'm going to quickly pull this out to give you an exploded view so pop that up you can see there's an elastomer and that's compressed by this little spring perch here that pushes into our load cell and what happens is let's quickly reassemble this when we reach the point of maximum deflection here a couple of things happen so the elastomer will inevitably expand to the point where it starts to make contact with the outside of the chamber here and that is going to limit the amount of deflection which is available in the elastomer itself and that protects it from becoming damaged over time then we also have a mechanical bump stop here in the form of this collar actually making contact with the assembly here because of the way that's designed once we make contact there you can't actually deflect the load cell any further so that is basically what is limiting the maximum amount of force which the pedal can read and again if you want to understand more details on exactly how this works check out our dedicated video but that gives you a quick rundown on the various different types of designs which are typically used on load cell pedals so i'll get all these off the table again and let's have a quick look at exactly how this operates so because of the way the elastomer itself has been developed what hewsonville are claiming is that the deflection doesn't really matter because it's not going to deform beyond its maximum tolerance anyway and i was honestly skeptical of that when we did our review of the hue single ultimate plus pedals months ago now i thought that we probably would run into the same issues that i ran into with the original ultimates that i had happy to report that we did not have a single issue with those pedals there were a couple of other problems that we had with those two things working that way loose over time and whatnot none of those things have been an issue with the ultimate plus pedals and what they've done is they've carried a lot of those elements from the ultimate plus design across into the revised sprint design so i can only assume at this point at least that we're not going to run into any issues with these blowing out either obviously we will let you know if we do run into any issues and again let us know in the comments down below if you do own a set of these pedals and you have had problems or let us know if you haven't had problems it's always great to get as i guess as big a picture as we possibly can from the people that are watching these videos to give the people that might be looking at buying them the biggest opportunity to know exactly what reliability is really like in the real world so we push down on the pedal the spring compressors you can see we've also got a bunch of spaces in here as well so it's quite a complex design and there's a bunch of different options which are available in terms of configurations here to get exactly the kind of feel that you want so what i'm going to do now is read again from the manual they've actually given us a really nice and you can read this for yourselves if you want to it's available on their website break principle of operation so it says the sim pedal sprint brake pedal is force based the harder you press the higher the signal output to the simulator software will be obviously that makes sense so your brake pedal is equipped with a two-stage system initially a metal coil spring this guy is compressed the coil spring simulates the pad to disc gap the main loading of the brake disc is then simulated by compressing the rubbers so just to explain that clearly as you initially push down on the pedal you've got a little bit of uptake here as i like to call it which is provided by this spring so it's a relatively low tension spring it's not providing a massive amount of force but you can see here there's absolutely no slop or play in that pedal at all so it's actually quite stiff even just pushing it down on the table you can see i actually have to push the arm against the table to make that compress so that is designed to simulate the feeling that you get when you push down the brake pedal in a car before the pad actually makes contact with the rotor now in a real-life current will depend on the type of car that you're driving obviously race cars tend to have a smaller gap there always has to be at least some form of a gap between the pad and the rotor simply because otherwise the pad would be dragging all the time be generating heat and actually slowing the car down ever so slightly on straights so the idea is you want to have that little bit of dead zone there before the pad and the rotor actually make contact then obviously once you push the brake pedal down beyond that point the pad starts to interface with the rotor and that is what creates the friction which creates the braking force and slows down the car so what that's doing is it's simulating that feeling and again we'll talk about exactly how accurately that represents the real life sensation when we get up and driving in just a minute but you can of course configure things around and when we look at the software as well you'll understand how exactly we can play into the calibration too with dead zone and things like that to adjust just how much influence this has you can set it up so that the car starts breaking immediately as soon as you put pressure on the pedal if you wish to do so but if you want to set it up as is intended with the spring what you would do is calibrate the pedal so there's enough dead zone there that you're not getting any braking force until that spring is fully compressed and then you would start to actually get braking force inside your game once you start to compress the elastomer here so that is how that works so then we go on into all of the adjustments that are available on the brakes so let me just quickly go back to the front page and those adjustments are brake pedal stiffness as is stipulated by the combination of elastomers and springs and spaces which you have in here and then of course the pre-load adjustment too so those are literally the only two things that you can adjust on this beyond just the pedal face and the angle so we don't have the force curve adjustment up and down here like we have with the other two pedals or the maximum throw adjustment or deflection adjustment one of the things you'll notice here is there isn't a mechanical bump stop for how far you can push the pedal down that is stipulated purely by the combination of elastomer spaces and springs that you have in here but we do have as we saw before a bump stop here for the return so you can see as the pedal returns back to zero there's a rubber bump stop in there which again gives us silent operation for the pedal return and we're not going to get a mechanical clunk or metal to metal contact when we push down to our maximum either so let's look now at exactly what adjustments are available in terms of our spring our spaces and our elastomer so as you saw during the unboxing the petals do come with an assortment of spacers which are purely just hard plastic they don't have any deflection in them at all i'm not sure whether that's acrylic or delrin or what it is actually looks like acrylic but as long as they don't crack which i'm sure they won't it doesn't really matter what they are the point is that they don't have any deflection in them whatsoever so they don't compress as you push down the pedal they're essentially just like a hard stop kind of material and then we've got our various different elastomers which are available here too so you can see written inside he for houston vault engineering hard and 19 which is 19 millimeters then we've got a housing valve engineering soft 19 millimeters and then we've got a soft 37 millimeter as well so by default what we have is three spacers and then we have a 28 millimeter soft elastomer so as it's configured here we might overlay some footage of me actually pushing the pedal down you can see the red spring compressors first that is the pad to rotor uptake we don't have any compression at all within these hard disks and then all the rest of the pedal travel is stipulated by the hardness of the rubber elastomer in the top section of the stack here so we have six in total different resistance settings as recommended by them we can go one hard 19 millimeter elastomer so in that case you would take your 90 millimeter hard one and then you would have an assortment of spaces behind that the next setting after that would be a single 19 millimeter soft then we would go to the 28 millimeter soft which is the default setting as we described you could then go for a 37 millimeter soft so obviously being longer you're going to get a little bit more compression there so we would remove one of our hard pieces in the stack and then we start to get into combinations of elastomers so we can go one soft 90 millimeter plus one soft 28 millimeter and then the softest setting would be 119 millimeter and one 37 millimeter elastomer so in that case you'd have this guy the spacer then this guy and then your springs and then on top of those six static configurations we also have the ability to fine tune based on our preload to give us more granular adjustment now just in regards to preload here before we move on one thing that i think is really important to just note here is that because this red spring here is the weakest spring in the in the chain here so because it's simulating that petal uptake what's going to happen is as you wind on more preload it's primarily going to take away from that spring first you can imagine that is going to compress before the others it's doing exactly what it's designed to do just like as it would when you push down on the pedal so as we wind in preload the first thing it's going to do is it's going to remove the ability to have that uptake and then after that it's going to start to compress the other spring so of course it does serve as a way to dial out that uptake entirely if you don't want to have it there but just want to make sure you guys understood that it will primarily impact that first before it begins to impact the rest of the field beyond that point so the way we would do that would be quite simply to release the retaining nut undo that and then just adjust our preload in or out so obviously in will make it stiffer and out will make it softer so i'll also show you quickly how to actually change out these elastomers too it's pretty simple we want to just undo that retainer nut as far as it will go because we want to take all of the preload off the springs entirely so they become non-captive so we're going to wind down our preload as far as it will go like so and you can see now this entire stack is loose we pop the back out so you can see it's got little notches in there in the middle swing it up and then all of these individual pieces will come out now obviously take note of how it's all put together because you want to make sure you're putting it back in exactly the same manner so we've got spacer and so forth so you just swap them out for whatever you want and then when you're done pop it all back together again so we're going to pop this guy in first and this actually serves two separate functions in case you're wondering so it's a spring locator stops the spring from dropping down or moving out of alignment but it also forms a hard bump stop here as well so you don't push that spring beyond its maximum tolerance so you can imagine if we put this guy in place now we've also got a little spring locator and sleeve on the back half of this and that is delrin by the looks of things so that will pop in place our spring locator goes on and what that does is locate the top half of the spring but also stops us from being able to push that spring beyond its maximum deflection point so we're going to push this forward again slide it into position lock it into place and then wind our preload back on and make absolutely sure that you do wind this retainer nut back into position that is one problem that again i had with my original ultimate pedals which hasn't been a problem on the ultimate plus pedals and i assume won't be a problem on these either but again let us know in the comments there were a couple of cases where the retainer nut would become loose and then the whole thing would kind of just blow apart when you push it put down on the pedal you can imagine if this becomes loose and it comes out of its little alignment notches here when you push the pedal down it could just explode out backwards but yeah as i said hasn't been an issue with the ultimate plus pedals and i don't think it's going to be an issue here as well now the really cool thing about this is that you don't need to take the pedals off the rig to make any of these adjustments as you can see this just kind of folds up the pedal slides forward so while it isn't completely tool-less like some of the other designs that we have reviewed in the past it is something that you can easily change between different cars on a regular basis so you're not stuck with the one configuration one thing i have found with a few other pedals on the rig that we've tested over the years is you know if i'm just wanting to jump in a different car like a street car or something i usually can't be bothered to change these things out simply because you have to pull the pedals off the rig and it just becomes a pain something like this however on the other hand is relatively simple to change so i think that covers pretty much everything in terms of pedal adjustment as i said before with the manual you get a nice little visual representation of all the different configurations here as well so they really have made this as simple as it can possibly be it really is dummy proof you can see the various different combinations there and exactly how it relates to foot force here too so you can see how it's a kind of non-linear curve here to simulate braking force now one other thing that i will quickly mention here as well as they do go on to elaborate on some of their recommended settings for various different types of cars too so i would definitely recommend having a read through that yourselves i'm not going to go through it all now because it doesn't really matter for a review video but i do want to note that that information is there and it gives you a nice solid base point for i guess fine-tuning around your personal preference based on various different types of racing cars because every car does feel a little bit different in the real world so it's great that they include that as i guess a base point reference as to what should feel relatively realistic compared to the real life counterpart so let's get these pedals mounted up on the base plate now show you how all that works show you the measurements and bits and pieces like that then we'll take a detailed look at the smart control software and do some driving tests so before we move on to the software and driving experience let's just quickly have a look at the various different mounting options which are available here so we've talked about adjustment all those things a couple more measurements that you need to be aware of on the throttle and the clutch you can see we have a uniform pattern across the bottom here we have what is it 12.5 millimeter long slots here so it allows us some forward to back movement and we'll talk about that once we've got things mounted up on the plate in just a moment the importance of that so you can mount directly to aluminium profile or to a pedal plate depending on the rig of course and whether it has provision for this kind of layout so across all three pedals we have a measurement between the center of each slot of 69.5 millimeters and in the case of the throttle and clutch we have a spacing from left to right from center to center of 60 millimeters on the brake it is 70 millimeters so you can see there it's 10 millimeters wider on the brake than it is on the throttle and clutch so simple as that if you're mounting directly to a rig which has provision for it then we also have the option of the base plate so this is as i mentioned before the team redline version for all intents and purposes they work exactly the same way it's just cosmetic differences between the two so we have the heel plate here which is constructed of two millimeter thick steel and that's that same bead blasted finish to give it that slight texture exactly the same as you have on all the shiny surfaces on the pedals so nice and uniform there then we've got a three millimeter thick steel back part here which is where the pedals actually mount to and you can see there's slots cut out here for the pedals that gives you a little bit of lateral movement so you can move the pedals from side to side on the tray like so or like so i should say probably actually goes that way around so you can move them from side to side like that and you can imagine that's going to give you a pretty large scope of adjustment there so with the throttle in its furthest right position the gap between the two plates is about 70 73 ish millimeters for the largest gap possible and then if we move the brake and the throttle across to the innermost positions we have a gap of about 27 millimeters so pretty massive scope of adjustment there and obviously you can imagine you can move the you can actually move the clutch all the way over here if you wanted to but i mean yeah you get the idea there there's plenty of lateral adjustment there let's just quickly get these guys off the base plate again i'll quickly run you through exactly how this goes together so you have two mounting rails here now importantly these mounting rails actually match the footprint of the thrustmaster t3pa and t3pa pro pedals so if you have a pedal plate existing or your rig has provision for mounting those particular pedals then you are going to be able to bolt this directly to your rig so that's a nice little touch there so what you're going to do is you're going to orient these facing outward like so that's going to make it a little bit easier to mount the screws through later you're going to have the larger holes at the bottom smaller holes at the top the heel plate is just going to go on like so lining up the holes and then the back plate is going to mount on the rear like this now we also have the option here of a couple of little spacers to raise up the heel plate if you need to do so so you can raise that up by 20 millimeters or 40 millimeters and the mounting hardware they include is all really nice high quality stuff appears to be stainless steel and as we mentioned at the start of the video when we're unboxing they do include some spring ball type t-nuts and bolts if you are mounting the pedals directly to your rig as well so everything you're going to need is most likely included it would only be really fringe cases where you might need to duck down to the hardware store to pick something up and one other thing i will mention here too is they do also include a extremely detailed manual for the base plate too gives you all the measurements all the tools and bits and pieces that are included so you can check you don't have anything missing you can see all the dimensions measurements and everything there various different bits of information for mounting they really do not leave you in the dark at all it's completely described here so there's no excuse for getting anything wrong or getting confused and yeah just again the attention to detail is absolutely fantastic so let's get this assembled now we'll give you a quick look at what it looks like all put together and then we can get into the software calibration and driving tests okay so quick look at the pedals fully assembled just so you get a clear picture of what's going on there so very straightforward exactly as we described before one thing i did just want to quickly point out though is you'll notice there is a little bit of an offset between the throttle and the brake pedal even though they're mounted flush as far as the base plates is concerned now that is intentional that is to make heel and toe driving a little bit more easy so it is a subjective thing of course but the majority of people say when they're healing and towing when they push on the brake they kind of want it to be sitting flush with the throttle pedal in its in its depressed position which is what this is going to allow us to do so you can calibrate that out obviously by moving the throttle a little bit further forward or the brake a little bit further back and there's plenty of scope to do that but just wanted to point that out but otherwise very simple very easy to put together and yeah it looks really nice and classy in my opinion at least let me know what you guys think in the comments [Music] okay so pedals are installed on the rig now one tip i will give you just from the experience of installing them on our p1x here is it was actually easier to mount the rails to the p1x pedal plate or the p1x profile i should say and then kind of build the pedals on the rig rather than build the pedals and then try to install them on the rig getting underneath and getting those bolts installed into the profile was quite tedious it's not hard by any means but just a little bit fiddly so that was what we found ended up working best for us if you do have a rig that allows you to just drop bolts straight through and screw them in from the underside or bolt them in from the underside then it shouldn't be a drama at all but that's our experience so look normally what i would do here is take you through my first impressions just kind of pushing the pedals static on the rig before we get in and driving because we have so much adjustability available on these pedals i want to spend a bit more time than we might normally do on that so i want to start off by talking about the software calibration profiles and all those things first thing i wanted to just quickly mention though is if you're looking at the pedal footage while i'm pushing the pedals you might notice it looks like there's a little bit of flex there because of the design of the load cell on the brake pedal remember that entire back part of the pedal is actually rotating or pivoting around the bolt in the center so you can actually see the cables moving up and down so i just want to make sure that you guys were aware that that isn't flex that's actually working as it's intended to do it appears that there's very minimal flex there in the pedal plate at all that's a good thing to see of course but we'll talk about that a little bit more later on but i just wanted to i guess say that up front just in case while we're doing the software and calibration you might notice there's a little bit of flex and wonder what's going on so let's bring up the houstonville smart control software now it's just an executable that you download from the houstonville website now if you have seen our ultimate plus review the software is literally exactly the same so you don't need to watch through this again if you're already familiar with it if you've already watched that review but for those who are new to this software let's go through this now in detail now there's a couple of standout features here which i think are really important to call out from the start you are able to save profiles with this software which means if you do have different calibrations or different setups for different types of cars or you want to share setups with your friends you can do that that is something that we don't see on many pedals to date and definitely something that i think is a big advantage now the other i guess call out feature in my opinion here is the fact that the calibration in the profile is actually flashed to an eeprom or saved on an eprom on the pedals themselves rather than stored on your pc now the reason why that's important is it means that you don't have to go in and calibrate your pedals for every single sim title or sim titles that don't read calibration from the pc so erasing for example if you're using pedals that require you to use something like di view to calibrate the pedals you'll know that you actually have to calibrate the pedals in eye racing in addition to in di view because there's a separate calibration process there so when you save the profile to the pedal itself what it means is that that profile is affecting the signal as it actually comes out of the pedals and into the pc rather than being manipulated on the pc itself and what that means in a practical sense is when you go into eye racing or any other title that requires its own calibration all you need to do is just push each pedal to its maximum return it to its minimum and the calibration that's actually saved in the pedals will be what is influencing the signal and how it's actually interpreted in the sims so that makes it easy if you're changing wheels changing hardware or if for some reason iracing loses the calibration you guys will know that you know if you have to go and set up your pedals again it's very difficult to get the brakes set up exactly the same way as you had before and that will have an impact on muscle memory and potentially mean you have to relearn how to brake most efficiently so having that calibration stored on the pedals is really powerful really beneficial in that sense so the way we do all that is basically just very simply set up our calibration set up our profiles hit save active profile to pedal eprom that is then flashed to the pedals it stays on the pedals until you replace it with something else and then if you click on the little burger menu up here you can save the active profile to your hard drive you can load a separate profile from the hard drive and you can also save the loaded profile to your sim peripherals meaning flash it to the pedals and you can see here just a quick overview of the calibration as it stands in the active profile too so very well laid out software here it's you know it's pretty simple and basic to use it's quite intuitive as well but also very powerful so let's run you through the individual calibrations for each of the pedals now remembering that if you make any mechanical changes to the pedals if you change rubbers if you change preloads anything like that you will need to come in here and calibrate again from scratch so let's click on the calibration tab to begin with we're going to click on start calibration and select the pedals for calibration so we're going to click on all three here we're going to go next step make sure that all pedals are in their rest position so feet off the pedals and that is going to set our baseline or our noise floor i guess you could call it click on next step and then we're going to push our throttle pedal all the way down there we go we're going to hold it there we're going to go next step push the brake pedal down with the desired maximum force so we're going to push that down and this is going to be an arbitrary value it's basically going to be the maximum amount of force that you ever want to actually have to push the pedal to inside the game so you're going to have your threshold point which is where you'll modulate around and usually i like to have my threshold point around about 80 braking pressure inside the game and then you want to modulate to your maximum around that so if i push it a little bit further about 60 kilograms feels about right to me remember we are running the we are running the medium setting here for our elastomers we'll experiment with some other settings a little bit later on we're getting to our first impressions one of the concerns i had you would have noticed earlier in the video was i was a little bit worried i might end up maxing out this load cell obviously that will depend on how heavy footage you are i am used to very heavy pedals though so that seems to be absolutely fine so that's about the maximum amount of pressure i would ever want to put in at absolute maximum breaking to 100 in the game so we're going to click on next and then we're going to do the same thing with the clutch as we did with the throttle so just pushing it to the maximum and next step and there we go press save to store the new calibration settings to the pedal controller so this is going to be flashing it to the eeprom on the pedals themselves save calibration and then we can go in and we can just check so throttle should get to 100 when we push it all the way down now you can see there because we do have a soft bump stop at the end it's actually only getting to about 96 97 percent when i push it down just lightly and i have to actually push it a little bit harder to compress that bump stop to get to 100 so what that means is i can either recalibrate that to calibrate that little bit out or i can add some dead zone in the profile a little bit later on so we'll do that check the clutch as well that's not a problem that's going to 100 and then for our break i should be hitting about 80 braking pressure when i hit my threshold point or that clear transition where the pedal becomes noticeably stiffer so i'm going to push that down and there you go it's a little bit of a cheat when you're looking at the numbers there but that did feel intuitive really pretty close there somewhere between sort of 75 and 82 and then i can modulate harder i can push up to 100 if i want or i can modulate down and that feels very comfortable so i'm happy with that calibration and that is all good so now we're going to go across to profile and let's run through some of the other fine tuning settings that we have for each of our pedals so this would be a good point to point out once again the manual has an extreme amount of detail when it comes to all the calibration settings and exactly what they do and how they actually apply to different types of cars as well which is really great so it talks here about non-linear curves to each of the pedals and some of the scenarios where you might want to use those so we will run through that in a bit of detail in today's video as well but definitely check the manual which you can download from their website if you want to see more on that let's run through the fundamentals quickly now so let's start off with the throttle pedal remember again before i said when i was pushing the throttle down to the maximum because of that soft bump stop at the end there which does make the pedal nice and quiet we did have a little bit of under calibration there you can see i'm getting to about 98 97 throttle input when i'm pushing the pedal down to the soft part of the bump stop so what i'm going to do is i'm going to increase my top dead zone a little bit and you can see as i do that the output value which is the value that the sim will actually see is now up to 100 so i'm going to give myself a little bit more headroom than that i'm going to go to 10 percent and now what we should see is that just before we get to that bump stop we should be reaching 100 throttle yep that's exactly right now in terms of bottom dead zone this is going to be more arbitrary so if you have a habit of resting your foot on the pedal and getting a little bit of throttle input that might be making you carry a little bit too much speed mid corner or making your braking less efficient then you can add a little bit of bottom dead zone there as well default is five percent but you can add a little bit more so you can imagine if my foot is resting on the pedal like that when i'm braking and i'm getting 12 throttle what i can do is increase my bottom dead zone and that is basically just filtering that out but i'm going to leave that set at five percent and one of the things you will notice with these pedals is there's absolutely no slop there whatsoever they are returning to their zero point and you have to actually intentionally kind of put some weight behind the pedal before you'll start to get any reading which is something that we always like to see on any set of sim racing pedals so that's our top and bottom dead zone works exactly the same way for the clutch as well so you can imagine if you're not quite reaching 100 when you push the pedal down you can add a top dead zone if you've got a little bit of a habit of resting on the clutch pedal you can add a bottom dead zone there to calibrate that out as well so in terms of our output here we also have the ability to set non-linear curves for our petal response so say for example you like to drive cars that are a little bit underpowered you want to be able to get on the throttle as quickly as possible what you can do is you can set a curve like that and what that will do is ramp up the throttle more rapidly so you can see along our bottom axis here is our mechanical input or what percentage we're actually pushing the pedal down physically and then up here is the percentage as it actually outputs so you'll notice when i've got my pedal pushed to 50 percent here mechanically we're actually getting 65 in terms of our output so you can imagine if i push the throttle down i'm getting my output more quickly now if you're driving a car that has a lot of power maybe a rear wheel drive with no traction control and you need to be a little bit more soft on your throttle input to stop you from just wheel spinning out of the corner then you could go with a graph that has a slow start for example and you can see here basically the opposite so when i have my pedal push down to 50 percent we're actually getting 40 output as far as what the game sees so we've got a bunch of presets here which we can go through and then we can also set our own custom curve as well so we can just ramp these up and down or we can use the sliders to give us the value that we want so normally you would always want to start at zero percent we might say want to have a really aggressive input so we go 20 and then you know something like that for example say so it's starting off really steep and then tapering off that one there's a little bit out of whack there we go that's a little bit better there but again you get the idea here you can customize this to basically be whatever you want and you can see at 40 physical input i'm getting 50 throttle output so not only do you get the percentage on the sliders but you can also see how it relates on the graph like this now unfortunately you can't click on the individual nodes and move them around like we have seen on some other software packages but again because you've got the sliders here you've got the values you can put up and down it's really not an issue so i'm going to set that back to linear for now that's generally how i like to drive i don't generally find that non-linear curves are particularly useful for me i prefer to just adapt my driving style but again that is a very subjective thing some people absolutely swear by the ability to do this so i definitely think it is a valuable inclusion in the software so it works pretty much exactly the same way well exactly the same way in terms of how the clutch works remember we were talking before that we have a kind of non-linear response in our clutch pedal so we have that second stage where it kind of rolls over and actually becomes softer to simulate the physical uptake in the clutch and the the clutch actually engaging so the flywheel connecting through to the driveline so obviously you want to have that mechanical feel in the pedal match as closely as you can to what's actually going on in the car that you're driving and that's going to vary depending on the car so say for example to use what we were talking about before so we want to have a curve like that i can feel about there is where the changeover is taking place so the pedal becomes noticeably softer just around there so we might want to make it so that our bite point which might be 70 percent in the game is taking place around where we're feeling it here so what we can then do is bring our 90 value down to about say 75 percent or 80 if we've got a friction point around somewhere like that 75 for our 60 percent 70 percent for our 40 and now what's going to happen is our clutch activation point or our bite point in the game matches very very closely to where i'm actually feeling it mechanically in the pedal so hopefully that makes sense it just gives you a way of making the pedal match mechanically in terms of its feel to what's actually going on with the car so in terms of the brake now exactly the same adjustments once again for our non-linear response you can imagine for a car for example that is really sensitive between maximum braking pressure and locking up maybe something without abs you might want to have a non-linear curve again something like this so that you get a little bit more sensitivity in your pedal between locking up and maximum braking efficiency but again it's purely just going to come down to the type of car you're driving and i would highly encourage you to reference the instruction manual for some other scenarios here so again we've got presets we've got the ability to set a custom profile as well should you wish to do so i'm going to set that back to linear again we do have an adjustment here for our bottom dead zone so if you have a habit of resting your foot on the brake pedal obviously you don't want to have input in the game now this can also be used for dialing out that pad to disc uptake that we talked about before with the red spring what i might actually do is just dial out a little bit of that so i'm going to increase that up to about 10 there and you can see now i actually have to push the pedal down about five or so percent mechanically before i'm actually just going to increase that a little bit more so i'm having to push the pedal down intentionally before i actually get any reading in the game and then i'm going to have a few percentage there just where the pad is only just touching the rotor before we actually start to generate some real friction and then from there we ramp on our modulation all the way up to our threshold point which is where the pedal starts to feel noticeably stiffer and we'll talk about that in more detail in just a minute so that should be ideally around our sort of 70 to 80 braking pressure depending on the car that we're driving whether or not we have abs as well of course and then we can modulate up to our 100 mark beyond that so we don't want 100 to be absolutely explosively slamming the pedal down but you can notice here again with our sort of medium setting rubbers here we do have a max force in kilogram at around about 61. that does max out at 65 so i am very close to maxing out the load cell with this medium configuration but again remembering that i am used to quite stiff pedals here but that gives us a nice easy way to adjust the maximum amount of braking force in kilograms should we wish to do so and it's as simple as that once you've set up your calibration you're happy with everything save active profile to petals eprom and you're good to go you won't need to touch it again unless you need to change something and as we mentioned before you can go over here you can save this profile to a disk send it to a mate load a different profile from your disk if you wish to do so as well so again if you have different profiles of different cars or different sims you can load those in and there you go so all in all a very powerful piece of software gives you a lot of things that you can do very intuitive to use though no issues whatsoever in terms of confusing people i don't think and again make sure you read through the manual because it does go through all these settings in a huge amount of detail and it will fill you with confidence so you know exactly what you're doing before you sort of dive in and start tweaking things and again remember you can always go back to the default profile should you wish to do so so let's talk now about impressions just using the pedals and kind of analyzing their behavior before we actually get up and driving it's a little bit easier to do so when you can pay 100 attention to that and not sort of be concentrating on what you're doing in terms of driving on the track now as i mentioned earlier there is a wide variety of different adjustments that we can make here so it is going to be a very subjective thing the real point here is there's a few there's a few key fundamental things that i always look for in every set of pedals things like noise things like smoothness binding anything that is going to detract from the overall experience and honestly anything beyond that is pretty much just down to subjectivity so what i'm going to do is do my best to explain what the pedals feel like throughout the full range of adjustment and that is i think going to be the best way to kind of get the point across to you guys so you can decide whether these are the pedal for you so the first thing i notice here across all three pedals very very smooth operation you can see here there's no kind of binding or gripping as i push the pedals down everything is nice and smooth there's no noise really either so throttle pedal completely smooth no kind of clunk as it returns to zero no clunk as it hits a hundred percent either now we saw in the closer look those little rubber bump stops which obviously account for that same deal with the clutch so the brake is a little bit more noisy but definitely not anything that's going to be problematic it's absolutely not going to be the noisiest thing on your rig nowhere near as noisy as shifters say for example so all that sound is is just the individual loops of the spring touching each other as it reaches its maximum deflection there so otherwise very very smooth no noise there really to speak of or to be concerned about whatsoever so other thing i did want to mention quickly again we did mention it earlier on is that you might see what looks like a little bit of flex in the footage because of the design of the load cell break it does pivot with that whole back assembly moving including the bit that has the cables attached to it so if the cables look like they're moving around as i push the pedal that is intentional and it's not flex inside the rig now there is a tiny tiny tiny little bit of flex on the base plate itself but definitely nothing that is problematic at the pressure levels that i'm operating the pedals and i am actually operating these pellets at pretty much their maximum allowable force i'm running at 60 kilograms maximum value is 65 kilograms so it's not a problem for me i can't see any reason why it would be a problem for you but we will have another look at it when we swap out the elastomer for the maximum in just a minute but look in terms of the throttle it's actually got quite a nice progressive feel to it a lot of throttle pedals that we've tested here i've said have been quite unremarkable they all kind of feel the same now this doesn't have any hydraulic dampening on it so you don't get that kind of hydraulic pressure feeling behind it look honestly most throttle pedals in most real life cars don't have hydraulics in them anyway so it feels you know authentic enough to me let's just say so feels absolutely fine it's nice and smooth but it does have a noticeable progression as you push the pedal down now we do have this on the default medium setting at the moment i don't think there's a whole lot of point in showing you the minimum and maximum settings because you're not going to really see any difference on the film anyway but at the minimum setting it does feel obviously a lot lighter it's you know a lot easier to push down and you know it doesn't have quite so much definition in it at the maximum setting it does become a little bit too stiff for me personally so i'd say i guess the takeaway there is that there's enough adjustment range there that it's going to suit anybody regardless of how soft or how heavy you like your throttle pedal to feel but it does have a good amount of progression there it does give you a sensation of where you actually are within your throttle stroke rather than just kind of guessing and basing on position so yeah i guess the important takeaway there is that you can actually set your muscle memory to determine the amount of throttle input based on the amount of pressure that you're putting on the pedal rather than just the physical position which i think could actually be quite beneficial in terms of modulating your throttle more accurately so that's all good clutch pedal as we mentioned before does have that mechanical second stage so when we hit about 80 input it does roll over and becomes softer and it feels exactly the way you would expect it to feel i'd say it feels quite authentic as well obviously every car is going to have a slightly different clutch you know a twin plate brass button clutch is going to feel different from the clutch that you'd find in a mitsubishi mirage for example so yeah i mean i'd say that they've done a good job of giving a generically accurate feeling to what you would expect the clutch to feel like in a real car and that's probably really all i can say there you know it does what it needs to do and again you have enough adjustment range that you can make it softer or harder depending on what you're trying to emulate and obviously as we saw before with the calibration you can adjust that mechanical second stage to match the second stage as it would be in the car that you're driving so everything that needs to be there is there and it's certainly not something that i think you're going to struggle with either some clutches that have that second stage it's really quite you know heavily defined let's just say and so it can make it quite difficult to let the clutch out smoothly whereas this i'd say they've really kind of nailed the feeling so that you get you get that sensation but it's not so much that you like and it suddenly clunks out or anything like that so yeah i'd say they've done a really good job there and again it kind of shines through they've obviously put this through a lot of revisions they've obviously taken on a lot of feedback and really got this dialed in to you know what i would say is ideal for you know the sim racing context so yeah i'm i'm appreciating the attention to detail even more as i spend more time with these pedals just kind of feeling what they feel like in the sims so on to the brake pedal now now obviously this is going to be very very subjective there's a lot of different settings here i can say on the medium setting which is what we have here there is quite a bit of travel more travel than i would personally like but purely subjective there some people are going to prefer having more travel there but what is important and what's fundamental to breaking here so the thing we're going to focus on is having a clearly defined threshold point when we push down on the pedal now we talked about it a little bit during the calibration but what i mean by that is you can feel that first stage where all you're really doing is just taking up the red spring as you can see it on the screen and that is simulating the pad to rotor uptake before you're actually exerting any braking force on the car and then beyond that you push down and about there for me i'm feeling that i guess what i would call third stage of braking so that's where you effectively reaching your maximum efficiency in terms of braking so for most cars that's going to be around sort of 80 to 90 percent braking force and then around that point you can modulate your braking pressure so if you're finding that you're carrying a little bit too much speed you need to brake a little bit more or maybe you're not quite at the maximum efficiency for your braking you can put a little bit more pressure in or if you're finding that you're starting to lock up a little bit you can modulate your braking back off again as well now a really important thing to understand here is that a lot of people think that in cars that have abs all you want to do is just mash the pedal down to 100 braking and abs is going to take care of the rest now depending on the car that you're driving that may or may not be the case what you need to understand is that abs works very differently in a street car from what it works in a race car so in a street car its primary function is to make the car you know not lock up and not slide so it's to keep the car under control rather than necessarily maximizing absolute braking efficiency whereas in a race car what you're actually wanting to do is have the tires very very very slightly under rotate so what i mean by that is that the tire is actually rotating a little bit slower than the car is moving down the road that is where most tyres on most road surfaces are going to have the maximum amount of braking efficiency so what this allows you to do is i guess work in conjunction with the abs in the car to maximize your braking but the important thing is that you're able to hit that threshold point accurately and consistently and for me that is around about sort of 80 braking pressure so if i push the pedal down to there i should be able to hit around that 80 mark consistently every single time and then modulate around it so what's important from a mechanical perspective on the pedals is that they provide the level of feedback that you need to hit that threshold every single time without fail so with this medium set up there is a little bit more throw in the pedal than i personally prefer so what i'm going to do is go we're going to we'll go to the softer setting first and just show you how different that is then we'll go to the maximum hardness setting remember there are six different settings in total i don't think it's really going to be beneficial to go through every single one of those because you know really all you need to know is the scope between the minimum and the maximum but otherwise other things that i look for here are all ticks in the boxes too so there's no excessive side to side play there's no slop there's no dead zone there's no rattling there's no creaking there's no squeaking nothing that i'm concerned about at all the pedal faces slide really nicely under the feet as well with socks on we will put boots on in just a minute and test like that as well but first impression wise really is just reinforcing what i already expected that these are a very very well refined very well thought out product so let's quickly swap out our load cell to the softer setting we'll test the hardest setting as well and i'll chuck some boots on and let you know what it feels like with those on as well so it took me about 40 seconds maybe to change out the elastomers absolutely no stress there whatsoever obviously just take note of the order that everything goes in and it is outlined in the manual as well so there's no excuse for getting it wrong now subjectively i would say that the softest setting feels pretty horrible to me it is just you know it feels like pushing up against a block of rubber there's way way way too much travel in there for me we do still have a defined threshold point around about there but you can see just the amount that i have to push the pedal down to reach that point doesn't really suit my particular driving style but again the point here is that you guys can see what is actually possible here in terms of the adjustment range so you can decide for yourself some people might actually prefer to have this much travel in the pedal so really it is completely up to you now my personal recommendation is always try to teach yourself to drive with a shorter throw in the pedal just because it makes modulation based around pressure a lot more accurate so between the zero point and about there i'm really not getting any feedback through the pedal to tell me what kind of braking pressure i'm actually putting in in the game so really all of that for me at least is just dead zone really so again if you're driving a street car it does feel a little bit more authentic but for me all of my braking would be between about there and about there and all i'm really doing up to that point is just adding vagueness and adding essentially what's dead zone to the pedal because i'm not actually making use of that range at all so hopefully that makes sense and again it is a very subjective thing i know i keep saying that the point is again just to show you the range of adjustment that's available here rather than i guess give you best practices but for me i would definitely want to have a much stiffer pedal than this so let's set it up with the stiffer setting now and see how that compares so we switched over to the hardest configuration as recommended by the manual now what i'm noticing is that that initial uptake provided by the red spring actually feels quite sloppy now in comparison to the hard elastomer when you hit that second phase of breaking so you can see all of that petal movement there is purely just the red spring taking up and then from there basically to there is essentially from you know zero percent breaking pressure depending on how you calibrate for the uh for the uptake through to a hundred percent breaking pressure now there is still quite a lot of pressure based modulation available there and actually feels quite good but what i'm not liking is just the amount of movement that we have in the pedal there for that uptake so ideally what i would like to do here is wind that preload in a little bit further just to shorten the available range within that uptake but unfortunately what's happened with this configuration as stated in the manual what's happened is we've actually run out of thread on the push rod to actually wind that preload in any further so that is the maximum amount of available preload now we went back to the manual and we noticed that the stacks as it's shown here for the shorter elastomers so for the 19 millimeter long elastomers you can see it shows three of the spaces in each position and then when we go up to a 28 millimeter it shows two spaces for a 37 it shows one spacer and so the overall length of the stack there is actually 18 millimeters longer than it is in the other configuration so you can see even though the total length of the rod is the same the stack within the space of that rod is longer as you can see in that bottom configuration so when we unbox the pedals we had a 28 millimeter elastomer plus three of the spacers not two of the spaces and what that does is it lengthens the length of the overall stack and allows us to wind in a little bit more preload so what i'm going to do now is match that configuration as the pedals came from the factory in terms of the length of the stack by adding an additional eight mil spacer in addition to that hard that hard elastomer what that'll allow us to do is wind that preload in a little bit further and that will allow us to dial out a bit more of that initial uptake and i think that is going to give us exactly the feel that we want so yeah a little bit of an interesting one a bit of a discrepancy between what the manual says and what the manual illustrates and what we actually receive there but i don't see any issue with adding an additional space there to dial in again what subjectively i think is going to be the best feel for me but the important thing here is that we've illustrated the massive amount of range that we do have in adjustment now i'm sure that houstonville will address this little discrepancy here if they do we'll we'll pin their comment below i'll also get in touch with them by email and let you guys know in the comments in a pin comment what they say as well but yeah a little bit of a strange one there because what the configuration says in the manual doesn't match exactly what came out of the box even though it does say default setting but all we're going to be doing here is just adding a little bit of additional preload on that red spring so it takes out a little bit more of that initial uptake and now i'm happy to say the pedal feels exactly the way i personally like it so we've got a much shorter little bit of uptake there we can see there's already a little bit of compression or a little bit of preload on that red spring so that shortened our uptake which means we've got a shorter throw between the uptake and our actual braking zone or second stage now so i'm just going to quickly check the calibration as well make sure we're not maxing out that load cell so we're going to go start calibration calibrate the brake only all pedals in rest position maximum desired force so they're about there so again yeah around about the same pressure which is what we would expect because remember it's pressure based so around that sort of 61 62 63 kilogram mark so we're very very close to maxing out the load cell for my personal preference that is something that i do think you do need to consider so if you are really really really heavy footed you may end up maxing out the load cell but again remember i am used to using the the aesthetic invicta pedals which are extremely stiff and that is kind of my baseline here so i don't think it's going to be an issue for the majority of people and you could definitely reset your muscle memory to break with a little bit less force but it may be an issue for some people so it's something that we definitely need to point out here but that is done now we're going to next step save calibration go back to our profile and just make absolutely sure that everything is hunky-dory here so as i push the pedal down to my threshold point i should get to about 80 braking pressure as we saw before so about there there you go so 84.85 and then i can modulate my input around that very comfortably i've got a little bit of uptake there and you can see that uptake isn't actually registering anything and that's exactly what we want because as the pad is approaching the disk obviously there's no friction so yeah i'm very very happy with that calibration i'd say that's doing exactly what i want it to do so i think it's time to go for a drive so time for some driving tests as always with our pedal review videos we're going to be driving the 911 cup car around imola and i racing this car is perfect for testing out pedals because it's rear engine it has a really strong pendulum effect if you over break the tail end will overtake you it also doesn't have abs so it's very easy to lock up imola is a fantastic track for testing too because it's got a lot of undulation a lot of weird camber and it is a very challenging technical circuit so between the two of them it tests all of the elements that are important for breaking now first of all i'm just going to quickly comment on the clutch and our bite point here so i'm going to shift it into first gear do a bit of a launch so i can feel yet right where right where that movement is right where you feel that roll over in the pedal is exactly where the clutch is engaging now obviously i did calibrate that but it's d it's doing exactly what i want it to do now obviously if we're changing gears this car is a sequential but for changing gears we just slam away and you don't really feel that effect so really i think we've covered everything we need to in terms of the clutch already just in talking about first impressions now speaking of first impressions as well you will notice that i am still wearing socks i figured the majority of people looking at buying these pedals probably will be racing in socks so i thought i'd start off with that configuration and then we'll move across to boots a little bit later on i am used to using boots [Music] so i expect i'll be a little bit more comfortable in that regard with boots on but i'm going to try and break in all my normal kind of places here and just sort of get a feel for everything so [Applause] i'd say immediately it feels very familiar so again remember my baseline here my reference point is the isotec invicta pedals that's what i'm used to driving with at the moment and that's what i've kind of tried to dial these in to feel like because that's what i like best so i'd say you know again remembering that these pedals are a lot cheaper than those pedals the feeling that i've managed to achieve here is very very very close so that's obviously a reference to the brake pedal the throttle pedal feels really good as well again it's hard to sort of long as a pet as long as the throttle pedal is smooth and it's doing all the things it needs to do in terms of not binding providing enough feedback really there's not really a whole lot more that you can say about it than that so but i am noticing that progression in the pedal which you mentioned before so [Applause] now the tires are a little bit warmed up i'm going to pick up the pace a little bit too get rid of that overlay we don't need it [Music] and i'm just going to break in all my usual kind of spots and we'll see what happens [Music] yeah so very comfortable modulating the throttle there no issues at all a little bit of a back off we're going to be breaking just before the 50 trail breaking in a little bit more brakes back on the gas braking at the 50 late turn in late apex get back on the power as soon as we can [Music] yeah the brake pedal feels really natural to me i'm able to modulate my input perfectly fine [Applause] [Music] you can see the backing gets away from me a little bit if i break a touch too late it's a struggle to not have the back end overtake me which is exactly what i wanted to use this car to test with you can see that again just a little tiny lock up i think we'll do one more quick lap with socks on and then i'll switch into my boots and see what my feelings are like there so we're going to break on the apex [Music] just sort of getting a feel for the car again it's been a while since i've driven it you can see i had a little bit of a lock up there as i was modulating but i was able to back out of the brake reduce that locking up and still make the apex which is what we were wanting to do obviously [Music] [Music] modulation on the throttle there a little bit of a back out don't quite have my confidence in the car yet gonna break at the 50. [Music] backhand got away from me a little bit there [Music] [Applause] [Music] breaking at the 50 again [Music] yeah i'm really appreciating the uh progression in the throttle really i'm finding it's helping me to modulate my input quite a lot more than i expected it to go off track there so boots on now let's see how we go [Applause] [Music] probably should pay attention to the speed limit all right there we go [Music] so again i'm just going to break it all my usual kind of places whoa takes a bit of getting used to again so it's not instantly it's not instantly a hundred percent familiar [Applause] when we switch between the acer tech and the uh the acetic invicta and uh forte load cell pedals i was able to get it to feel pretty much exactly the same there is a little bit of a difference here i'd say really what it is is it's just down to that uptake spring [Applause] even with the reduced preload just not quite having that same level of stiffness that we're used to and again that is purely going to be something that you either like or you don't like you can you can wind it out entirely if you want to i think it's just going to take me a little while to kind of get my head around it and get a sense of where my threshold point is again [Music] it probably will only take me a lap or two to get used to it so it's certainly not a complaint [Music] yeah i'm already feeling it so [Applause] it's amazing how quickly your brain adapts to these things and again it just sort of goes to show that one thing isn't necessarily better than another just different a little bit of a lock up there i had to modulate my brake to not miss the apex all right let's pick up the pace [Music] but i am still noticing that additional definition in the throttle pedal that i spoke about before i thought that might disappear with boots on but i'm still feeling it [Music] [Applause] see if we can hold it flat yep there we go getting a little bit more confident now [Music] [Applause] there we go [Applause] [Music] so now that i've got my head around the difference i am still breaking at the same breaking markers i'm just having to adapt my muscle memory very very slightly which is something you're gonna have to do with any new set of pedals one of the things that really irks me that i see a lot is people people upgrade their pedals so say they've gone from a logitech wheel or something like that entry level thrust masters to something like a fanatex csl load cell for example and immediately they start complaining that the pedal is too heavy and they're slower than they were before [Music] any change in pedals any upgrade in pedals is always going to have a learning curve associated with it unless you're able to dial it in to feel exactly the same as what you're used to then you know obviously there's going to be a learning curve now the thing that doesn't make sense is when people spend a bunch of money to upgrade their pedals and then have in their mind that they're trying to calibrate them or adjust them to feel exactly the same as what they had before because it just makes no sense why would you upgrade only to make your pedals feel exactly the same as they did before so what we're trying to analyze here is a little nuances in the pedals the little details that we're feeling that allow us to understand what's going on with the car just that little bit more and you'll see already i'm not locking up anymore i've already got my head around that even though it is a very difficult car to drive and by no means am i as fast as the fastest esports guys [Music] i'm feeling all the little details that i need to feel and i'm getting the confidence so what i'll do is i'll do a bunch more laps now off camera kind of wrap my head around everything let tom have a drive too and then we'll have a chat [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay so there's been a bit of a heusing felt sprint sized gap in our pedal review videos for the last couple of years now we've been looking forward to reviewing these for a very long time now so what did you what did you think oh well they're very very very very quiet yes it's the first thing that strikes me yeah there's so so and and i think that that kind of says a lot about the overall quality of the build as well they have a very smooth sweet feel they feel just really good quality under your feet yeah they're really it's obvious from from start to finish that these have been designed by passionate sim racers i think we've got a lot of different types of pedals here one of the sets that tends to be on the more expensive side are pedal boxes that have been adapted across from real life race cars so say the tilt and boxes for example yeah and they tend to be a little bit more mechanical they maybe feel a little bit more authentic in some ways in some ways but yeah i mean ultimately they're still being adapted across to a sim racing context which is different fundamentally from how they perform they look rad in the pool room they do look cool but other than that they're not particularly practical given how much you're paying yeah when you compare something like this i think really as i expected would be the case with these pedals these really do i think these represent the sweet spot when it comes to sim racing pedals i think yeah you know there's definitely a market step up in quality between something like this and fanatec v3 pedals for example even with the performance kit when you start going more high-end than something like this it really is starting to get into that last few percent kind of performance where it's like it's more about the immersion that you get than getting what's important to driving quickly yeah so i think there's probably going to be a lot of people who might have the fanatic v3s already who would be looking at something like this you know it's a couple hundred euro more to step up to them and my my thoughts on that is that absolutely this is a well and truly worthwhile step up yeah definitely provided that you obviously are racing on a pc because you don't have console compatibility here and that is uh you know it's i wish they were console compatible because they would be absolutely amazing then but you know that's not their fault it's a limitation of the way the systems work and you know being able to have multiple input devices so you know they don't have a complete ecosystem now there are some other manufacturers that are playing in this space like asetek sim sports for example which are going to have a complete ecosystem with wheelbase yeah all those things so you know that is a factor there as well they haven't talked much about console compatibility yet but we expect that that probably will be something yeah okay so that is something that you want to consider here but i mean obviously that's a black and white thing these aren't console compatible so you're not going to be looking at them for a console to begin with so i've put together a bit of a list here of some of the things that stood out to me so feel free to add anything else that you're so organized i try to be i'll try to make it as efficient as i can well done so these aren't in any particular order of importance they're all equally as important really and if you have anything else that you think i missed i will jump in jump in so first thing i put and again not in any particular order enough scope of adjustment to suit just about anybody yeah so yeah i mean they went from much softer than we would either of us would want to probably harder than i would want and about what about yeah look i was right on the edge of maxing out the load cell yeah yeah and that does concern me a little bit obviously you know that is a limitation of these pedals there will be some people who want it harder than these can go yeah look i mean when it comes to the you know the acetate invicta the acer tech forte and the ultimate plus pedals those i can't imagine anybody maxing those out like no just they're ridiculously you know they've got a huge scope over the top of what most people are going to need for these i was very close to maxing them out so that is a consideration wasn't a problem but it could have been yeah and the ease of making those adjustments as well like if you want to change the feel of the brake pedal uh between cars it's definitely viable just to pull them out and put another stack of um elastomers in there it's worthwhile just to make that quick change yeah and even with the even with the throttle and the clutch as well there's enough adjustability there that you're going to be able to adapt it to suit a wide variety of different cars whereas other competitors within the space are very much focused at you know one particular style of car or you know racing cars in general whereas this is something that you're going to be equally comfortable with driving you know a street car around in a set of corsa or you know doing something like that drifting rally whatever yeah so these are definitely the more versatile overall when it comes to overall adjustability and of course the versatility in terms of mounting was pretty outstanding here as well particularly good yeah yeah you got the option of not having the base plate having the base plate you know anything in between you know it's all yeah pretty much doable with these which is great definitely what's next on the list next on the list what have we got uh quietest pedals that we've tested to date yeah as i mentioned before that was like the standout thing to me straight away it's crazy how quickly funny how like that's kind of you wouldn't think that that would be something that would matter but you know yeah well as i said it just it it speaks volumes into the quality of the build yeah exactly and i think that it is something that is important like particularly for us we have a dedicated studio it doesn't matter if we make noise most people are sim racing in a bedroom or in a living room or study next door to a kid that's sleeping or maybe they've got an apartment that they've got people underneath or you know so quietness is a very important factor for a lot of people you absolutely will not have an issue with excessive noise on these pedals obviously we haven't done long-term testing on them yet so we don't know whether they're going to start squeaking but we haven't had any issues with the ultimate pedals they're pretty much the same design in terms of the way the bearing systems work the you know the bushes all those things so i don't think there's going to be a problem there again let us know in the comments if you have had issues with them squeaking that's always valuable for the people watching the video to know what your experience is like as well but yeah as far as we're concerned in the context of a review they're the quietest pedals we've tested to date so yeah agreed definitely a thumbs up there uh really well refined and clearly designed by experienced sim racers right from the moment you open the box you open the manual you see the way it's all presented it's obvious that a lot of thought has gone in from end to end and you really feel like you're having your hand held the whole way through the process you know what you need to do you know how to set it up it gives you examples of how to set it up for various different driving styles you know all those things are covered yeah it explains why you would want it like that exactly yeah so it fills you i think and i referenced this a couple of times in the review like it just made you feel confident throughout you knew you felt like you knew what you were doing and somebody had your back which i think is really valuable yeah so yeah absolutely yeah definitely good in that regard as well and just little details like you know the angle adjustment the way the you know even when they're adjusted to the same angle there's a little bit of an offset between the throttle and the brake to you know be conducive to heel toe driving you know just little things like that that just let you know that this is designed by somebody that knows what they're doing yep it's a nice deep heel plate as well yeah he'll rest there it's just deep enough some of them haven't been deep enough so yeah yeah all those little i mean there's really nothing in terms of attention to detail that i can really nitpick about these at all everywhere you look they kind of just do it i think you're right yeah so next on the list uh i thought the compact design was quite cool as well it's you know they're really quite small yeah i have to say these are one of my favorite looking pedals yeah i just find them to be really classy and yeah cool yeah they look kind of they have that industrial race car kind of look to them but there's nothing really there that doesn't need to be there they're not over the top you know maintenance wise they should be pretty straightforward as well because there's not really a whole lot on there that doesn't need to be there so yeah exactly yeah so next on the list was outstanding software so that's something that we really liked about the ultimate plus pedals as well yeah definitely and for a long time you know there weren't many options when it comes to uh calibrating and saving that onto the the pedals themselves onto the eeprom um so they were you know an industry leader in that respect definitely there are a few other options that do that now yeah um but still it's it's fantastic software it's easy to use it's intuitive yeah so it makes it a lot more easy to you know just get up and running in various different sims if you if you're driving in a sim that does require specific calibration all you need to do is just push the pedal to the maximum release it again and basically the difference that it makes fundamentally is that the signal that is coming out of the pedals into the pc is pre-calibrated because the calibration lives on the pedals rather than being modified by the pc itself so that makes a big difference just in terms of overall ease of use once you get up and running in the sim i'd probably say with the software they probably could update the look of it a little bit it looks a little bit outdated yeah but at the same time yeah it's clean though it is clean i like it yeah i mean the asetek software does look more flashy yeah i'll give you that but i think at the same time you know the software does what it needs to do it does it cleanly there's nothing there that doesn't need to be there there's no clutter you know yeah it's just get in get what you need done never look at it so i guess what i'm saying it could look nicer but don't let those looks fool you it's very functional exactly exactly yeah i think that's fair yep all right so next thing outstanding documentation i think we already covered that pretty much yeah a few times i think i think we've done that one to death so let's move on except for the little um mistake that we came across was it i don't know was it a was it a mistake in the manual was it a an extra spacer in there that shouldn't have been there when they were sent to us from factory i'm not sure which way around it is if i find out yeah we'll find out we'll let you guys know in the comments but it certainly didn't seem to be detrimental to performance putting that extra spacer in there and it did give me the feel that suited my particular driving style best just allowed us a little bit of extra preload on the uptake spring which made all the difference for me individually but again depending on your driving style that will or won't be a thing but yeah and it didn't change how much force we were putting into the load cell either by doing that so yeah so yeah i didn't see your problem didn't seem to create an issue but yeah otherwise the documentation was very very clear very well written and again just obviously written by people that know what they're doing and have thought about pretty much everything so that you don't have to yep it's really as simple as that um bloody champions yeah and lastly on my list was that the elastomers which they've developed themselves uh have proven to be very reliable on the ultimate plus pedals that we ran for quite some considerable amount of time we talked in the review about the various different approaches to the design and having metal cups that restrict the movement of the elastomers so they can't blow out we as far as as far as we can tell that's not necessary with these ones so yeah it again it's it just goes to show you know they've they've come up with a design that does what it needs to do fundamentally rather than having to come up with solutions that prevent things from going wrong yep i guess is what i kind of mean by that so yeah really i mean i guess to summarize those points what i've written here is really the only reason to go for something higher end is if you want hydraulic dampening or you're maxing out the load cell which i was close to doing but yeah i think these kind of they hit the sweet spot don't they yeah i think so i think particularly for anyone who might have phonetic v3s and are looking at an upgrade option without spending you know completely ridiculous amounts of money these are a really really good option a couple hundred euro more yeah you're getting significant improvement in definitely quality not only build quality you know the overall refinement you know there's been a lot of particularly with the v3 pedals there have been quite a few little niggling issues like you know the the little aluminium screws in the in the heel plate which are made of cheese you know a lot of people have stripped out a little grub screw in the back as well trying to install the um the performance kit and the performance kit is an absolute pain in the ass to change the elastomers on yeah like this takes less than 40 seconds that i think the first time i did it took me about an hour you're right like it's just not a easy process so you know little things like that do make a big difference admittedly it's not something that you're likely to be changing all the time so that extra 230 euro assuming that you do need the hd sprint base plate you know you really are stepping up into a new class pretty much whichever way you look at it from build quality through to driving experience i always found with the v3 pedals and there will be people that disagree but i always found the v3 pedals there are just a few little things there just in terms of things like pedal uptake you know just getting that really clearly defined threshold point for braking there's definitely a clear advantage in stepping up to that now if we compare them to we already did a bit of a comparison with the acetic forte pedals remembering again that they are just a first look prototype at the moment when we do the full review of the final production version we'll probably do a bit more of a kind of head-to-head with these because i think that's quite valuable for people but for now i would say you know in terms of the overall drivability they're pretty much the same for somebody like me but if you need more adjustability then these are the clear winner obviously at this point in time now if you compare to something like the bj sim racing pedals that's another one that we've looked at which is around a similar kind of price maybe a little bit cheaper than these a complete set there for the three pedals plus the base plate 550 so 100 euros less than the sprinter look they're a little bit more heavy duty they have a heavier load cell in them but the quality just isn't there no they're not as adjustable you can't get them to be as stiff as these ones yeah and there have been those problems with the elastomer as well when you look at it i mean you know it's just the quality is not as good that you know the edges are sharp you don't have the um quality in the elastomers either we have had quite a few blowouts with those elastomers just doesn't have the same overall quality feel to it that you get here it just doesn't feel as well refined you don't have to wear as well yeah it's limited exactly you you're relying on the um di view software for these as well so i mean they're okay but these are better yeah yeah no they have a good feel i mean i enjoy driving with the bj's but um it's reliability that let's yeah that they would problem there were problems there yeah yeah exactly so another popular choice starting to push the price up a little bit but something i think we probably should reference just for those who are wondering mecha cut one pedals so those come in at 863 euro for the complete three pedal set with the base plate again you may not need the base plate depending on your rig pretty much the same kind of mounting solution as what we have here so if you can mount these without the base plate you'd be able to mount those without the base plate too so yeah 863 for the complete set versus 651 for the basic sprints without the uh without the team redline extras so yeah that's a big jump up in price it is a big jump up in price i sell for the meccas i think yeah look i did enjoy the mecca pedals i thought they were good i ran them on my rig for about two months and i was perfectly happy with them uh they do have that metal cup system there as well that stops the elastomers from blowing out but again that doesn't appear to be an issue with these ones they have been reliable you ran them for a length of time as well so we didn't have any issues in that regard yeah but i just feel like you know when you consider the entire package from end to end so the documentation just the overall refinement and quality that you get here is again in my opinion just that little bit higher than what you get with the mecha pedals so i would struggle to justify an extra 200 euro for the meccas over these i think anyway at the same price unless you're gonna max out the load cell on these yeah okay unless you're really heavily footed then yeah those probably would be the better choice yeah otherwise yeah i think i would probably go with these i definitely wasn't able to dial in the mechas as well as these the adjustability seemed to work best for me on these yeah but i think there's there's there's so much subjectivity like there's so much variation in what people like and don't like that it's not really a point of comparison between the two i don't think yeah i don't think that these fundamentally do any one thing better than those do okay they're just you know a different different approach yeah and i think it is important there to kind of pause and say that you know brake pedals in particular are just so subjective i mean we've been getting a lot of messages from people recently that are complaining because they think that the csl load cell pedal is too stiff yeah okay you know and for me like when we reviewed that if anything i thought that it was too vague and too soft because i'm used to driving with a heavy pedal yeah so i think best practices aside when it comes to braking technique which is definitely something that we can cover in a future video you know just goes to show how much subjectivity and variability there is between what one person might like compared to another so really the important thing is having that range of adjustability to suit multiple different people and that's the approach that they've taken with these pedals and that definitely really shines through so you know i can't imagine a scenario where somebody wouldn't be happy with what they get with these other than just the potential of maxing out the load cell if you are really really really heavily footed so i did have a couple of other little observations which i made throughout the testing process so what have i got here uh pedal uptake feels a little bit more vague than on hydraulic pedals so that's again just referencing that pad to rotor uptake when you initially push down the pedal with hydraulic pedals you do get the benefit of that sort of hydraulic resistance or the hydraulic pressure building up as you push down on the pedal with this it is being simulated purely by a spring and you can of course adjust it with the preload but it just it doesn't quite match that authentic feel that you get with hydraulic pedals and that sort of also applies to the ultimate plus pedals as well i think that is a point of difference between these and those because you know those do have those hydraulic dampeners that give you that sensation so definitely something that's worth considering there and i think probably the primary reason other than just the higher rated load cell on the ultimates to maybe consider the ultimates over these otherwise for the most part they are very close in performance i also put preload adjustment eliminates the uptake before it really has an impact on stage two so i think that is that's just something that's fundamental to the design of most pedals that we reviewed in the load cell category in general so as we were saying in the review as you wind in the preload obviously the weaker part in the stack in this case being the uptake spring is going to compress first so what i found is when i was trying to you know add a little bit more preload i had a little bit of fine-tuning in the stiffness all it was really doing was just removing that uptake and not really affecting anything else so what that ultimately means is that if you do want to fine tune between one stack configuration and another you're going to be winding up pretty much all that uptake before you actually feel any other change so the preload doesn't really affect the overall tension or force required it's just eliminating that first stage or that first part of the travel really which is exactly what preload is intended to do but that's the way it manifests itself when you're using these pedals so i think it's an important thing to point out and it is going to be the same with any kind of pedal system which uses a single mechanism with some sort of a progressive spring structure within it the weakest point is always going to compress first and that's what it's designed to do but you know obviously that's what happens when you adjust the preload so just an observation there and then the last thing i had here was whilst coated with resin to protect against shorting the exposed electronics are more prone to damage so as we pointed out in the review they have coated it with a resin to stop you know metal particles or liquid or anything like that from shorting out the electronics but it is still exposed we didn't have any issues with electromagnetic interference or anything like that that said we never have had a problem with that on our rig so you know your mileage may vary there they do say that it is ecc tested so it shouldn't be an issue for anybody but you know we can only test what we can test here i did feel like the usb connector is a little exposed there with the plug sticking out if it gets stepped on or yeah i mean generally you're not going to be fumbling around behind the pedals anyway but yeah if you did step on it it would 100 snap the connector off the board there so yeah there is that to consider but again that's kind of nitpicking isn't it it is yeah it's there otherwise you know the connectors that they're using the rj9s are nice and solid they're not really wobbling around or at risk of you know falling out or anything like that when you're driving yep and yeah i mean everywhere you look it's very hard to find anything for me to nitpick so yeah happy so in summarizing i feel like these represent a really good sweet spot within the market i mean they are still very expensive 651 euro is a lot of money and you know it what is essentially a pedal box for a racing simulator you know that's a lot of money to spend on an input device for a computer but you know you are getting fantastic quality here it is a clear step up from other competitors which are a little bit cheaper and i think really the the big point here and what this has proven to me which is what i was hoping it would do is that really when you step up in price from from this point onwards it really is just that last little bit of immersion that you're getting there it's not really adding anything that's fundamental to driving quickly and consistently everything that you need to do that is represented here and i think really what's outstanding about this is just that refinement and the ability to adjust this between all those different diving styles i really think that this is i can't think of anybody that wouldn't be happy with these unless you are extremely heavy-footed yeah and i think it's really as simple as that for me they're an outstanding product at what i think is a competitive price point it is expensive but there are other pedals on the market that are a lot more expensive than these that i wouldn't choose over these and i think that pretty much says it all yeah absolutely you're spending a heck of a lot more money to get not a lot more in return for for a number of different sets yeah so i think if you're if you've been wondering about the sprint pedals if you've kind of been really close to buying them and you're just not quite sure i'd say absolutely go for it i don't think you're going to be disappointed with them particularly if you are stepping up from something a little bit cheaper if you're kind of tossing up between these and others again it just comes down to ultimately what you're going to value and what's going to be important to you i think we've done our best here to kind of highlight what some of those differences are we've talked about the scope of adjustability we've talked about all the things that i think are important fundamentally to the sim racing experience and really from there on it's just purely down to subjective things which are up to you guys so hopefully the video has helped you out if it has leave a thumbs up we will be revisiting these pedals again when we get our hands on the acetech forte final production i think that's going to be a really interesting comparison between the two there but yeah as it stands right now absolutely no reason not to recommend these pedals i think they're absolutely great and i'm sure you guys will be happy with them too so thank you very much for watching guys we really hope you've enjoyed it and found it valuable if you have leave a thumbs up make sure you're subbed as well so you don't miss future videos and comparisons and we'll see you again soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 92,419

Keywords: Heusinkveld, Heusinkveld Review, Heusinkveld Ultimate Review, Best Sim Racing PEdals, What are the best sim racing pedals, Meca Cup 1, Load cell pedals, Best load cell pedals, Boosted Media Review, Sim racing pedals, Sim racing, Neils Heusinkveld, Heusinkveld Sprint

Id: 4iCRbGDdSts

Length: 118min 48sec (7128 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022