REVIEW - MOZA Racing FSR Formula Wheel

hey guys will here so we've been having trouble keeping up with mozza racing recently they've been releasing products faster than we can review them here and they've just announced again a a new wheel which we're going to be looking at today as well as a very exciting new package 5.5 newton meter direct drive wheelbase with a wheel and pedals for 599 us dollars so we're going to be checking that out as soon as we can unfortunately it hasn't arrived here at the studio just yet but today we're going to be looking at the new fsr sim racing wheel now this is very exciting because this is the wheel that people have been begging fnatic to make for a very very long time now so we're going to be checking it out today putting it through its paces and seeing whether this is a good option for your sim rig let's go [Music] so just quickly before we get started here as always a couple of quick housekeeping things to keep you 100 in the loop with exactly what's going on here firstly big thank you to moza racing for sending across this wheel and the other equipment that you'll see in today's video for review as well as the other manufacturers who we'll be referencing today too all the gear that we're referencing today has been sent to us by their respective manufacturers for review so thank you very much to everybody involved there now if you do decide you want to pick up this wheel or any of the other gear that you see in today's video we do have some affiliate links available down in the description below that is an awesome way of helping support our work here at the channel at no additional cost to you and in the case of mozza racing we also have a five percent discount code available for you guys too so check out the links down in the description below it will certainly help out with the price of this wheel but as is always the case here at boosted media no external company has any sort of editorial control over anything that we say today it's completely our own words our own observations and our own comparisons so that said let's get started okay so this is the mozza racing fsr steering wheel now it comes in at 649 us dollars which is obviously quite expensive for a sim racing steering wheel so let's have a look at how it's actually placed in the markets with respect to other alternative products here so for something like the gs wheel which is for the most part exactly the same as this minus the dash of course you're looking about 150 us dollars less than what you're paying for this wheel so one of the questions that we're going to be addressing today is whether it's worth actually paying the extra for this wheel over the gs wheel hopefully we'll be able to answer that one for you through today's process interestingly it comes in at exactly the same price as the porsche podium 911 gt3 steering wheel so the leather or the suede version of that now obviously that is a completely different wheel to what we have here but i thought it was an interesting comparison here in terms of the quality that you're getting between the two of those and you can see our review on that linked down in the description below as well now for a not insignificant 250 us dollars less than this you can get something like a phonetic formula v 2.5 or v 2.5 x now side by side they do look quite similar but there are some obvious quality improvements with the mozza racing gs and the fsr wheel over something like that so you definitely are getting slightly better quality for the price here in addition of course to the feature set and i'll highlight those differences as we go through today's video too and then if we have a look at something like a gomez gsi formula pro elite which is a wheel which we're actually working on the review for right now that comes in at almost double the price of something like this so that is obviously a step up in quality again and there are a lot of features that are available on a wheel like that that you don't get here but i just wanted to sort of i guess start this video off by putting this in the proper context and giving you a picture of where it sits in the market relative to some other alternative wheels importantly as well this is a pc only compatible piece of hardware now if you are wondering about using this with an aftermarket wheelbase there is a little communications port down the bottom here unfortunately we weren't able to get our hands on the usb adapter so we could test this out for you guys but what they tell me is that this will connect via usb directly and they'll also be the option for an adapter which allows you to mount this directly onto any other wheelbase but unfortunately i just don't have my hands on that at this point in time and i'm also not 100 certain whether that's going to be an additional accessory that you buy or there will be something that's included in the package what we'll do is we'll update you guys in the comments as well as on our written article linked down in the description once we have clarification on that so it certainly isn't a cheap wheel but when you compare it side by side with what else is available in the market with similar build quality and similar feature sets i think that it is fairly priced for what it is so let's go through exactly what those features are now we've got a diameter of 280 millimeters 10 millimeters more than we get with the fnatic formula style wheels which look to me didn't feel overly significant although a lot of people do complain about the phonetic wheels being too narrow and making a lot of cars feel too twitchy so if you're driving a lot of f1 style cars f1 f2 f3 for example then generally that's not quite such an issue if you're starting to get into more gt3 gt4 style cars a wider diameter is often preferable there so i think the 280 millimeter is a good design choice here somewhere between the 280 to 300 millimeter seems to be what most people find to be the most versatile and i would certainly agree with that as well now i've got leather perforated grips here as well they don't have a huge amount of squish to them you can see there if i push down it's really just the leather itself compressing a little bit there's no sort of squishy material underneath that so it is a relatively firm grip some people will like it some people will prefer a little bit more squish but a lot of other manufacturers are now moving towards that sort of rubberized material now that does have quite a bit more squish to it than this does so it's going to be a personal preference subjective type thing but it is what it is but i personally am quite a fan of the leather so much so that i actually swapped some of my other wheels from alcantara across to leather so again it's a personal preference thing but i'm a fan now we'll talk about ergonomics some more once we're up and running on the rig a little bit later on so i'm going to skip over that for now but suffice to say for now that all the controls around this area are relatively easily reachable while you're holding the wheel you will of course have to take your hands off the wheel to manipulate the five dials in the center and the two buttons that you have down the bottom here but i would say at a top level that the controls are very comfortable and easy to reach so to elaborate on controls a little bit more here let's talk about the inputs that we have available on this wheel there's certainly a lot of them so we've got 10 push buttons here all the way through across the wheel those have a good tactile feel for them exactly the same as we had on the gs wheel if you watched that review a couple of weeks ago so they're not the snappiest buttons on the market by any means they do have quite a bit of squish to them but they do have a nice defined click once you get to the activation point again it's going to be a very subjective thing here but they certainly aren't the snappiest buttons that you'll find they're certainly not as snappy as you find on a phonetic wheel for example but i personally actually really like the feeling of these buttons exactly the same as what you have on sim magic wheels for those who might have experienced those but you can see they're about a two millimeter travel for each button and i'm happy to report that all the buttons that are on this wheel at least do feel absolutely identical to each other there were no weirdness or sticky buttons or anything like that and they don't rattle around too much either you can see the tops are nice and solid there's a little bit of wiggle to them just as they move around but they're not rattling inside the enclosure and if you shake the wheel and do things like that there's no rattles or anything like that either some buttons that we've seen on some cheaper wheels do rattle a little bit so that is something that i always look for and something that i'm happy to report isn't an issue with this wheel now those buttons also do have a pretty cool feature in that they are rgb backlit too when you start up the wheel it has a really funky startup sequence that kind of sweeps across and then you have the option to change the color of each led through seven different colors for each individual button so we'll show you how to do that later on in today's video too but that allows you to create cool little combinations of different color schemes depending on your personal preference which i think is a really fun touch while we're on the subject of rgb leds we've also got an rgb rev strip across the top here and again that is customizable we'll show you that later on today as well then moving down we've got a couple of thumb encoders here those also do have push button functionality nice aluminium anodized caps on those two unlike the plastic caps that you get on a phonetic wheel and that is one point of difference that i think is important to point out there that is one of the areas where you are spending extra but getting more quality and those have really nice solid defined detents to them as well so really firm click in each position in fact i almost would go as far as to say that they might be a little bit too stiff for some people without gloves with gloves on though i think they have a really nice feel to them and you certainly aren't going to activate one of these by accident you're going to know when you've clicked into a new position which is a good thing so moving down again now we have two what appear to be analog hat switches here those inside the software actually operate as digital switches so you can configure them to be either a d-pad or a or a button and each one of those can be activated in four directions so up down left and right as well as push button but they don't have rotary encoder functionality unlike the funky switch that you'll find on phonetic wheels again for example so it's a little bit weird that they operate like analog switches in terms of their mechanical movement but they operate like digital switches or d-pads inside the game that's something that we've seen across all the mozza wheels so far and i haven't actually been able to get a good answer on exactly why they've chosen that maybe they'll switch to an analog input later on down the track with some different firmware or something like that i don't know but it is what it is so it's worth calling out there so moving on down we've got two more buttons as we saw before and then we've got our five rotary encoder multi-position switches and again these have got really nice anodized aluminium hats on them unlike the plastic ones that you get on a phonetic wheel which we have seen a few of those crack over the years not ourselves personally but i've seen plenty of people have issues with those splitting and falling off fanatec of course do replace those under warranty without any issue but these have a nicer higher quality feel to them straight off the bat now again these have nice solid clearly defined detents in each position so you're not going to spin one of these by accident you're not going to knock it into a different position if the wheel's spinning in your hands and you happen to brush across it or anything like that so i'd say you know really really nice really high quality feeling here as well now importantly these can function either as rotary encoders or multi-position switches and we'll unpack that further when we get into the software a little bit later on as well and explain to you exactly why i think that is a great feature so that is all of the inputs that we have on the front face of the wheel we'll talk about the lcd panel in just a minute but let's spin the wheel around now and take a look at what we have on the back in terms of our shifters and paddles so we've got two magnetic shifters here with about a seven millimeter throw as i measured it we don't have any adjustment in or out for these paddles we also don't have any adjustment in terms of the amount of throw but what you can do if you need to is detach these paddles and mount them on the front face if you need a shorter distance between your hands gripping onto the wheel you could of course get some longer screws and put some spacers in there too if you needed to adjust forward or back relative to your hand size but they don't include anything like that inside the package now on the back here you can see the little neodymium magnets as well so they do have a nice magnetic clunk to them you can't really hold them if you really try you can but you can't really hold them on the threshold and then activate them that's a bad habit that i have with any shifter that isn't magnetic i tend to sort of hold it near the threshold and then i often end up miss shifting just because of that bad habit with these it's a very very intentional click now the shifters themselves are quite loud and that is simply just down to the metal to metal contact you have on the aluminium cage and aluminium arm on the shifter now they do include inside the package as well some little rubber strips you can install on either side to soften that down and that does make a significant difference to the overall volume reduces the throw a little bit and of course gives you a slightly more cushioned feel when you activate the shifter too so what i would recommend is experiment without them first before you install them see whether you can live with the noise and then if you can't go ahead and install them if you need to so we've got our up shift and downshift and then underneath that we have two analog paddles as well so these have a decent amount of throw to them there about a one centimeter throwing them i actually really like the amount of throw that these have i find some wheels have a little bit too much the phonetic wheels for example for me at least i find that those pull in maybe a little bit too far for me and they can become quite clumsy these have a good amount of reach to them so you can still get a good analog feel here for when you're launching your car if you're using it as a clutch but not so much so that it becomes awkward to operate so a nice amount of spring resistance in there too you can see the little springs in the side there that is how those operate and these are configurable either as a dual stage clutch individual analog axes or individual digital buttons and we'll again cover that in detail and we get into the software in just a minute now they tell me that they're using photoelectric sensors for all of these paddles as well which means that there's no mechanical moving parts which are responsible for interpreting a signal and that of course is going to reduce the opportunity for wear and tear there so that brings us to the quick release which you guys know by now i rate as the best quick release available on the market from an oem at this point in time now obviously if you're going to aftermarket there are a few options there which are equally as good if not maybe even a little bit better than this but equal with sim magic and imsource who use the same quick release mechanisms on their wheel and wheel bases this is a really really awesome system very simple to use clicks on and clicks off extremely easily and we haven't had any issues at all when it comes to reliability with these quick releases either now one thing that you may notice in the back of this wheel unlike the other wheels that we've looked at from moza to this date we have a whole bunch more pins inside the assembly here so we've got the standard row of pins across which interface with the contacts on our wheelbase but then we also have a row up and down here as well so that may make you wonder exactly how the screen on the front of the module interfaces with the wheel now what they tell me is that it's powered by the inductive coupling system that we have in the quick release and we've explored that in detail in our wheelbase reviews from mozart links down below so if you're using the wheel with a muzzle wheelbase it powers the wheel via the pins on the back but communicates with the wheel including the display via the bluetooth protocol that they're using so it's a proprietary protocol that is specific just to the mozza ecosystem now of course remembering as well that we do have the little communications port on the bottom that we looked at earlier and that allows you to use the wheel with any other aftermarket wheelbase you simply plug in via usb and you're able to control the wheel through the mozza pit house software so let's talk a little bit more now about what i'm sure you guys are most interested in the lcd display and then we'll unpack the build quality a little bit further before we get into our software and driving tests so we have a 4.3 inch lcd display here not oled and one of the things that you'll see later on is that the contrast ratio isn't absolutely fantastic on this display although there's absolutely nothing wrong with it either it's pretty typical for most lcd displays but it's certainly not on par with what you'd have in a modern day smartphone in terms of contrast ratio for example but we have a resolution of 800 pixels wide by 480 pixels tall and in my opinion at least that is perfectly adequate for the size display that we have here the text appears nice and crisp and clear and yeah absolutely no issues with regards to that whatsoever now as we touched on earlier the wheel does communicate with the mozza pit house software via their own proprietary protocol what that means from a functionality standpoint is that you're not going to be able to use software like z1 dashboard sim hub joel reel timing ultimate game tech for example none of those software packages are going to work with this display so that is unfortunately one distinct area of weakness with this wheel compared to some of the other competitor products that are on the market which have integrated dashes but on the plus side it does make it extremely easy to use so you plug it in the display comes on immediately and you can choose between 15 different telemetry screens which i'll show you in just a moment at least at launch and they do tell me that they're planning on expanding that quite significantly as well now i did ask them about the ability to customize those displays within the pitt house software itself they said that it wasn't something that they had planned at this point in time but they do intend to expand the range of displays available beyond what you're going to be seeing in today's video now just quickly in regards to the functionality when it comes to the display as well one of the questions that i'm sure people will have is how do you actually switch between displays on the wheel now we're going to cover that in detail when we go through the software in just a minute so i don't want to cover it here as well but definitely pay attention to that very closely when we get into that a little later on in today's video because it does have some important caveats which i think are important to pay attention to may be a determining factor in whether this wheel is going to be suitable for you or not but let's move on now and talk in a little bit more detail about the overall build quality construction materials and take a look at the internals so i've brought the gs wheel into the picture here as well just to give you a bit of a comparison between the two one of the things that i subjectively didn't like about the gs wheel was all this superfluous plastic around the buttons here which really just kind of give it a cheaper look than what it needs to be so i'm really happy that the fsr wheel has a very clean and professional look overall it doesn't have all that superfluous plastic you can see there's a bit of plastic shrouding around the display itself but i think most people would agree with me that it overall is a cleaner and more high-end looking wheel than the gs wheel is purely just down to the fact that we've done away with a lot of this plastic now in terms of the actual materials used here mostly the same we've got five millimeter thick carbon fiber for the front plate of the wheel and that actually extends all the way through the hand grips as well which gives it a really solid construction absolutely no twist noticeable at all there just holding it with my bare hands and we'll check that out when we're up and running on the rig in a minute too no creaking in the plastic either which is always something that i check for but very very solid construction all the way through out there plastic housings here for the grips but then obviously the leather wrapping around that now importantly one point of difference here is if we spin the two wheels around the gs wheel does have a plastic shroud around the back here so this entire piece here is plastic and if you watch the review where we pulled this one apart you'd actually see that there's a metal assembly inside this and that is what creates the rigidity of the gs wheel whereas if we have a look at the fsr wheel this entire rear assembly here is all cnc machined aluminium so definitely a step up in quality not that it really makes an overall difference to the driving experience but it does give you that clean professional kind of look that was lacking a little bit with the gs wheel and the reason why i'm calling this out and comparing them directly side by side again is because i know that a lot of people are going to be wondering whether they're better off buying the gs wheel or the fsr we also display aside i wanted to make sure that i highlighted these subtle differences between the two of them that may otherwise be missed so as i mentioned five millimeter thick carbon fiber for the face plate we then have three millimeter thick carbon for our paddles and no noticeable flex there at all when driving i mean if i twist it i can make it flex a little bit but when you're driving you're not going to notice anything there they are nice and solid just as solid as a wheel which costs a lot more than this does so nothing to complain about there whatsoever nice thick aluminium cages here for our shifters as well and just everywhere you look on this it screams quality which of course it should do for the price there's no way around that it is an expensive wheel but i'm happy to see that there doesn't appear to be any corners cut at least externally so let's pop the covers off now and take a look at what we can find inside okay so we've got the wheel disassembled here just want to show you a couple of important things firstly i've removed one of the hand grips here so you can see how the five millimeter thick carbon fiber extends throughout the entire rim so that provides the rigidity that we were talking about earlier now while we're on the subject of rigidity here you can see the quick release mechanism you can see the wires that go through to power the lcd and the wheel itself and that plugs into a little connector internally which we'll see in just a minute so those bolt through into the aluminium housing there's some threads inside there if we lift up this housing and i've got to be a little bit careful here because i don't want to unplug things everything's kind of hot glued together but what you'll see there's some threaded posts here on the aluminium housing and those actually go through to the front face of the wheel so that explains why the wheel does feel nice and rigid on the rig and you'll see that in just a minute now in terms of the pcb here you can see it's a custom designed pcb now one interesting thing of note here is you'll notice the little ribbon cable connecting through to the main pcb that is what connects the lcd panel directly to the motherboard so i wasn't sure whether we might find something like an arduino board in here that was driving the lcd but certainly doesn't appear to be the case which is what i was expecting given the way that the software works for driving the display you can see the little processor sitting there as well that is an arm st32f429zgt6 for those who might be wondering one other thing you'll notice too is a little bluetooth transceiver sitting down here that is of course what's responsible for communicating with the mozza base and you can see the rj communications port there for connecting through via usb to the pc if you're connecting that way but really nothing else particularly of note here one of the things that i complained about with the gs wheel was that the quality of some of the hand solder joints where the rotary encoder multi-position switches were soldered to the motherboard weren't particularly tidy there are a couple of joints there that were borderline dry joints whereas this looks to be pretty clean and tidy all the way throughout so you can see the majority of these surface mount components are all wave soldered or soldered as part of the manufacturing process of the board and then when they've put the rotor encoders on they've hand soldered those in place now the connectors here as well that go out to our shifters our analog paddles and of course our power those are all held in place with silicon as well i don't really want to break that silicon to unplug them simply because they are pretty flimsy you can see there how that's wiggling around that's not going to be an issue when the wheel's assembled anyway because none of these cables are ever going to be moving but nice decent thickness quality gauge cable here as well running through and yeah absolutely nothing here to be concerned about whatsoever in terms of build quality exactly what i expected to see given what we've seen in the past from mozza wheels if not maybe a little bit better with regards to the quality of the soldering so i think it's time to get this put back together and let's check out the software and driving experience all right so let's pop the wheel onto the rig as we saw before there's no other external connections other than just the quick release for connecting to a mozza base if you're going to be connecting to any other wheelbase obviously you'll need a hub and you'll need the usb connection as well but all we need to do is just pop this on straight on like so you'll see the wheel go through its little boot sequence there dash pops up straight away and the first thing that i notice absolutely immediately here is that the 800 by 480 resolution on this 4.3 inch display does look really nice and clear and chris certainly seems to be adequate resolution for its size and all the text is very very easy to read even just the little labels for each field are very clear and crisp so that is definitely a good thing to see and in terms of ergonomics just quickly as well i can reach all three of these top buttons quite easily without having to move my hands around the wheel too much thumb wheels are nice and easy to reach too nice detents on those as we mentioned earlier on so you really do have a nice clearly defined click for each position there if anything they may be a little bit too stiff for some people but i'm sure you'll get used to that these two buttons here and the thumb sticks nice and easy too so really the only time you're ever going to need to take your hands off the wheel is just to reach the encoder multi-position switches down the bottom or these two buttons here so very happy with the ergonomics and layout of the wheel very comfortable in the hands as well so shifters really nice solid click to them i'm not feeling a lot of reverberation through the casing or anything like that like we've had with some other wheels they are quite loud but we do have those rubber pads which we can install to quieten that down if you wish to do so now as we saw earlier we don't have any adjustment in terms of how far these paddles are away from the face of the wheel so you can see there for me i do have quite large hands and it is a little bit of a stretch there so if you've got young kids that are wanting to use a rig or you have particularly small hands you may find these to be a little bit of a stretch what you could of course do is mount the paddles on the front face of the rocker arm here rather than the rear you could of course get some longer screws and install some spacers as well if you needed to do so so there are ways around it but they don't include anything like that inside the package and there are two analog paddles here as well have a good amount of throw to them i think that there's enough throw present there that you shouldn't have any issues if you wanted to map these to a throttle and break a handbrake or a clutch regardless of what you're wanting to do now one thing that we have seen a few people complain about with some other wheels is lack of space in these areas around here for your thumbs now i don't find it to be an issue at all with this wheel i can turn 180 degrees in either direction without any problem whatsoever one thing you may notice is that it is a little bit sharp on this top edge here so if you do have a habit of dragging your thumbs around like that and sort of rubbing them on the tops it may be an issue for you but i don't think it's going to be an issue for me and in terms of overall space i mean i don't have the thickest fingers in the world but it's certainly not an issue for me at all but that said i haven't had an issue with the uh with the fanatec mclaren wheel either and we have seen quite a few people complain about that not having enough space so this does have a little less space than that does if it bothers you one thing i do like though is that because these are push buttons as well as rotary encoders i can easily just bump those with my thumbs in multiple different positions while i'm driving without having to take my eyes off the road so yeah it may bother some people but for me at least it's not an issue at all and then just to quickly touch on flex and things like that too no twist to report in the wheel at all i'm not detecting anything there at all there's no creaking in the plastics either obviously we have a carbon fiber frame as we saw earlier running pretty much throughout here so i was a little bit worried we might get a little bit of creaking in the plastics around the grips but that doesn't appear to be the case at least on this example we've got the cnc machined aluminium enclosure on the rear too so it is really nice and solid there's absolutely no flex in the wheel itself a tiny little bit of flex maybe in the quick release but certainly nothing to complain about at all definitely on par with what i would expect and what we've seen with other wheels around this sort of price point with the exception of fnatic of course which has a lot more flex than this does in the quick release itself but you can check out our reviews of their wheels for more information on that so big thumbs up in terms of ergonomics layout and basic functionality let's take a deeper dive now into exactly what we can do with button mappings and the lcd screen on this wheel okay so let's dive into the mozza pit house software now and look at exactly what we can and can't do with the fsr wheel now we're not going to go through the entire software suite in today's video if you're wanting to understand exactly how everything works in pit house check out our mozza r9 review series but we're going to jump down to the steering wheel tab for now and this is where we can set up everything as it pertains to the wheels specifically here we've got various different buttons which we can highlight here and it tells us what the functions are of each one gives you a graphical representation of the function of each thing as well just like what we have with phonetic for example there's nothing particularly special there we also have a little button here for key combination description we're going to come back to that in just a little while because i want to run you down the right hand side here with some basic functionality first so we have a dual stage clutch system here just like what we have on some of the other muzzle wheels which we've reviewed in the past so we've accessed combined mode that allows us to set a byte point between the two sides so at the moment you can see it's set to fifty percent on the slider down the bottom here so what that means is that when you release one hand it's going to go to fifty percent clutch engagement and then you can release the second hand to get underway so you would set that bite point to the friction point of the car that you're driving that allows you to when the lights go green let go of one hand get the car underway and then slowly let out the second hand to get fully underway whilst minimizing wheel spin or bogging down so we've got access combine mode we've got access split mode here too that allows us to assign an analog function to each of the two panels so say for example you're not able to use pedals you could have it mapped to throttle and brake you could have it mapped to brake and handbrake or clutch and handbrake whatever you want to do as an analog input you're able to do that there and we can also assign them as buttons too and that just becomes a push button activation then moving down to band knob mode so in button mode when we rotate each one of these rotary encoders you can see that it flashes up on the screen with a corresponding number so that is like a multi-position switch mode so what it means is that each position is its own function as you can map it in the game now some games will support this some won't so say for example you want to have engine map 4 always correspond with engine map 4 inside the game you would map position 4 or switch number 4 as the map number 4 inside the game whereas if we switch it to rotary encoder mode which is generally more compatible what happens is every time we rotate to the right it's going to flick once to the right every time we rotate to the left it's going to flick once to the left but it's not going to remember its previous position so you can see if i spin it around to the bottom and then wait for that to disappear when i go back again it's going to start at the top again every single time so it's not going to remember its previous position but it does have the most compatibility there so it's great that they give you the function for either multi-position switch or rotary encoder that means it's going to work regardless of what sim you're running so we're going to leave that on knob mode for now we'll go down to stick mode now this allows us to choose between button assignment or d-pad assignment for our two analog switches on the front here now the interesting thing about muzzle wheels and i still haven't really got a clear answer on exactly why this is but they function mechanically like analog switches you can see here they move around freely but in terms of how they're interpreted inside the software it is a on off switch in each direction so when we're in button mode it's going to show up as a button press inside the game when we're in d-pad mode it will assign as a d-pad function so that can be useful for some particular games like f1 games for example can be a little bit funny with some of the mappings for menu options so between these two settings you're able to find something that's going to work regardless of which game you're playing which is again a very useful thing to have we're going to leave that on button for now engine rpm indicator switch mode so we've got an rpm indicator for the bar across the top here so that's obviously going to raise and lower depending on the rpm of your engine and we can configure that further down below as we'll show you in just a minute we can switch the led bar off entirely and we can also just have it fully illuminated at all times here too and you can see the rainbow colors through the rgb leds there as well they do fade away quite nicely as well you'll see there when it's pulsing it does fade in and fade out and there's a nice kind of fade between the leds as well and that does give you quite a nice effect there so then we move on to engine rpm display mode so mode one it's going to illuminate in a different color for each segment as it progresses along the bar so similar to what we see here for example in mode two what will happen is as the bar progresses across it's going to all illuminate the same color so it will start off one color and as it goes further up it will change color gradually as we move up so moving on down here now engine rpm indicator timing this is purely just to adjust the timing in which each segment of the led strip will illuminate relative again to the engine rpm and you can customize this as well so you can set various different percentages and adjust them as sliders too you can also adjust the led colors here for each individual segment too so if you want to do something custom here you can do that and all you need to do is just drag the color to the segment that you want and that will change it and we can also adjust the brightness for the leds on the face of the wheel here too so that is going to adjust the brightness of the strip as well as the brightness of the individual leds for each push button we'll show you how to change the colors of those in just a moment too so we're going to move across to dashboard settings now and here is where we're able to switch between the 13 different default displays as they have cooked in now i'm hoping that at some point we'll have the option to create our own custom displays here i did have a bit of a poke around in some of the files that come with the pit house software to see whether it was possible to sort of customize things there and it certainly isn't something that's going to be user friendly if possible at all there isn't like obvious image files that you can manipulate or anything like that so i would like to see more customization here in the future but obviously on the flip side of that the more customization you have the less user-friendly things tend to be out of the box so it's good for people that just want to get in and get racing straight away and don't necessarily care for that kind of detail but personally i would like to see more customization available here but that said we do have quite a variety of different screens here available so which was quickly tapped through and you can see here on the screen what they look like you can see all the basic stuff that you're going to want is there so you've got your tyre temperatures you've got core temperature and brake temperature there as well a bit more information on that screen as we thumb through just purely just down to what options you like to see on the screen in front of you can see this one's got fuel level this one's a little bit more basic and you get the idea there so some of the cooler ones along here these ones actually show tyron so i found in f122 this one was a little bit weird it starts at zero and works its way to a hundred rather than working from 100 tread down to zero so it seemed a little bit backwards to me at least but it is what it is this one very similar to the display that you actually get in f122 so we have our core our carcass and our brake temperature for each segment this also shows any damage that you have on the vehicle too so if you do have contact you'll see the area of the vehicle damaged highlight as well so that's a great way to see visually whether you've gotten any damage in an accident and then going through the rest of the dashes here you can see just more information again depending on what you want so in terms of engine and vehicle telemetry there's really nothing missing here at all that i can think of but i can imagine some people would like to be able to have like a leaderboard on the screen for example or show the name of the driver in front or behind you know things like that which you can do in simhub and zed dashboard for example that you can't do here at least in present but for what it is i think it works quite well and you know it's well laid out and easy to move through as well and we will show you in a moment as well how you can switch between these screens on the fly without having to come back to the software too so we have a separate adjustment here for the lcd brightness obviously independent of the leds for the red meter and the illuminated buttons and you'll notice at 100 brightness there is quite a lot of backlight bleed coming through the screen so you can see the black area behind the behind the display isn't necessarily a very deep black as we wind that down it does get black up but at the point where it becomes a deep black like you'd get with an oled panel for example you can see the areas that we actually want to be able to read on the screen become quite dim as well so the contrast ratio isn't fantastic with this panel but i think it's adequate for what it is i don't think it's going to upset anybody but if you've you know if you're used to looking at an led screen for example it definitely is a step down from that but again as i mentioned before the resolution is very good and you can fade that all the way down to zero like so so if you want to switch the panel off for some reason you can do that as well and then lastly we've got a couple of adjustments here to switch between kilometers or miles per hour and celsius or fahrenheit depending on your region so if we click on the key combination description button here this is where things start to in my opinion fall apart a little bit so what they're obviously trying to do here is provide an experience like what you have with the phonetic tuning menu where you can change options on the fly but with the phonetic ecosystem you get a visual representation on their little oled display of exactly what is changing on the wheel so you can see what you're doing in real time now with this it's purely just a button combination that you press which changes settings there's no visual feedback on the screen to actually see that something has been changed and what i would really like to see here is the ability to assign a dedicated button which isn't mappable inside the game to adjust some of these core functions so that you're not getting confused between what the game is trying to do and what the display is trying to do for example so you've got adjustments here you can see push the left clutch paddle plus the left rocker which is our thumb switch here or plus the right rocker the left clutch paddle plus the brake bias knob and so forth to adjust our steering angle so that is just purely how many degrees of rotation we have now that's not something that you're likely to be wanting to adjust on the fly anyway so i'm not really sure why they've put that there but you can imagine if you're in a scenario where you're holding the left clutch paddle and you happen to press one of those buttons inside the game it's going to make that adjustment and that's going to throw your steering way out and that could be a race ruining thing so i feel like this is a bit of an afterthought here and i feel like what they really need to do is make at least the options so that you could maybe assign one of these buttons in the middle to be like a function button so that you have to hold that down and then do whatever you want to do without it i guess tangling or clashing with something that you might be trying to do inside the game now obviously you're not going to be changing your wheel rotation frequently when you're inside the game anyway but where it starts to get really clumsy is when you're switching between the displays for example so you hold down your right hand clutch paddle and then flick through with the thumb switch to go between the screens and then you know that works quite well but you can imagine every single time you pull that lever inside the game you're going to have the clutch applying which is obviously not something that you want when you're driving so basically makes it impossible to be able to change these screens while you're driving unless you have the clutch assigned somewhere else so yeah you can see there why i think it would be a better idea to have one of these buttons assignable purely just for changing the screen or maybe even just having the abs wheel in the middle here assignable so that all it does is when you go to the right changes to the right when you go to the left it changes to the left so the good news here is that i'm sure this is something that they'll be able to fix in future firmware updates it's not like there's some core functionality physically missing from the wheel obviously we have a tuning menu button on fnatic wheels and it would be good to have a separate button like that on this but i don't see any reason why we couldn't just assign one of these existing buttons to a function like that i think there's enough other buttons here on the wheel that assigning one of these to that function wouldn't necessarily pull away from the experience inside the sims so i'm confident that's something that they'll be able to fix but for now that is the way that it works now of course the other thing i promised i'd show you how to do is how to change the color of the leds for each of these push buttons so all we do is we push our two thumb buttons in like so you'll see the top bar will flash like that and then we just push the button it will cycle through to the next color once you're happy with the color you just move on to the next one and so forth when you're done push the two buttons again and that is locked in simple as that [Music] okay so let's talk about the driving experience and conclusions on this fsr wheel from mozza racing now i'm going to break this up into two sections we're going to look at the wheel itself lcd display aside to begin with then we're going to talk about the display and what that brings to the table whether i think it's worth the extra money over the gs wheel so look in terms of ergonomics driver usage and all those important things regarding the wheel specifically really really happy with the experience it's very comfortable to use i really like the leather that they've used here as well it feels really nice in the hands pretty much exactly the same experience as you get with a leather bound phonetic wheel which of course you're going to expect for the price that you're paying here now in terms of overall build quality i would say this is a small step above what you get with fnatic obviously you've got the more solid quick release here that is an important factor but that's more talking and pertaining to the entire ecosystem rather than just the wheel specifically so you do have the advantage of a cnc machined aluminium enclosure with this wheel if you compare that to a phonatic wheel that is plastic but otherwise the fit and finishing quality is quite similar with the exception i would say of the buttons having a more sort of cushy squishy feeling on this wheel whether that's something that you subjectively like or dislike is up to you actually quite like the feeling of the buttons on this wheel they have a nice tactile click to them but it's more of an intentional click rather than being like a momentary flick of each switch one thing that i do think absolutely stands out on these wheels compared to their phonetic counterparts is the quality of the rotary encoders slash multi-position switches that they're using particularly the thumb encoders here they have a really kind of not overly stiff but a much stiffer feel to them than the phonetic wheels do much more clearly defined detents in each movement and of course they have the push button function as well all the rotary encoders multi-position switches here are aluminium anodized as well whereas on phonetic wheels they are plastic and we have seen examples of those cracking over the years so that is definitely something to factor in i think when you factor in all those things even though at face value it looks very similar in quality you've got the carbon fiber face you've got the leather grips all those things are very similar between the two the overall fit and finish i think on this model wheel is a step above what you get with a fnatic clubsport v2 or v2.5 wheel for example but at the end of the day the raw driving experience between this and something like a fanatic v 2.5 formula wheel is very similar similar diameters as well at 280 millimeters and while this may be a little bit narrow for people that are wanting to do say gt3 style racing it is well suited to your formula style open wheel cars so moving on to the integrated dash now the 4.3 inch 480 by 800 resolution panel now this is where the experience was honestly a little bit disappointing in my opinion now i think there is a lot of potential here and don't get me wrong i think that it is an excellent wheel but there are a couple of areas where i felt like it just felt short of my expectations when you consider the price point that we're looking at here now the experience in using this wheel can probably be most closely compared to that of say the ferrari sf1000 wheel from from thrustmaster that has a clever integration with the lcd panel where it uses a wi-fi system to communicate back with the pc and it brings in telemetry data based off pre-defined screens so you're not using third-party software like sim hub or z dashboard or something like that to generate the displays now that has the advantage of being very easy to use very plug and play you plug the wheel in you get everything up and running and you're good to go pretty much with no fuss and no stuffing around the disadvantage of that approach is that you don't have the customization level available like you have with something like the gsi wheel which we're going to be reviewing very soon here on the channel now the flip side to that is that a wheel like this takes quite a lot of stuffing around to get up and running now there is a strong community around a lot of these wheels that use simhub for example and they generate a lot of a lot of dashes that you can use just by installing through their community and you know get up and running that way but if you really want to get in and get the most out of a wheel like that you are looking at at least a couple of days at least in my experience of you know messing around learning the ropes with simhub and really getting in and customizing everything so it really just comes down to what you're looking for out of the experience i think if you want high levels of customization and you know you really want to get in there and get everything looking exactly the way you like it then you know something like that is probably going to be a better option for you obviously you're paying a price for that but if you're looking at something that just works out of the box then the approach more like the ferrari sf1000 or the mozza fsr wheel is the better option for you now i said that i was a little bit disappointed with the experience with the dash here and i want to highlight that this is this is issues with the firmware and software and its infancy at this point in time i don't think that these are fundamental hardware issues and i'm confident that these are things that will be improved upon over time with future software updates and firmware updates so what i'm going to do is keep you guys updated down in the comments section i'll put a pinned comment there when i hear of any progress or when we're able to test out some progress to let you guys know whether anything has changed since what you're seeing in this review if you head on over to our written article on our website boostedmedia.net as well i'll put a link in the description for that too we'll also keep that updated with the latest information as well because i do have a feeling that the experience using the dash part of this wheel is going to change significantly over the coming months so the reasons for saying that are twofold firstly i feel like the information that's presented on the dash it almost feels like it's been designed with the codemasters f1 games at the first and foremost of the design like the reason i say that is you know a lot of the screens show a formula one car for example a lot of the telemetry data which it's actually trying to pull in from so say for example the areas where you can see the tyre surface and carcass temperature as well as a break temperature a lot of those only work in those codemasters games or a select few other games if you go into something like eye racing you're not able to see things like tyre temperatures in real time and that's an issue across most dashboards it's obviously going to depend on the telemetry data that's being outputted by the sim and whether that's available but in the context of other dashboards where you can customize things you can obviously work around that and make the dash make the best use of the telemetry data that is available through that particular sim whereas something like this there's very few screens at least at this point in time where all of the information works in the one place unless you're using one of the more cut down screens so if you wanted to see damage if you're wanting to see tyre wear tire carcass tyre surface temperature those sorts of things you are limited in the sims that it's going to work with at this point in time and i'm not going to go into a massive amount of detail on you know what works where and what doesn't simply because i'm sure this is going to change quite rapidly and i don't want to steer people in the wrong direction but suffice to say that at this point in time at least and it is early days for this wheel there is a lot of room for improvement there the other area of improvement here as well was just the integration in how we change settings live on the wheel particularly switching through dash screens here if you don't have your clutch mapped or at least the right hand side clutch mapped inside your game then it's not quite such a problem but having having double ups between mappable controls inside the game and commands which actually tell pit house what to do does become quite cumbersome quite clumsy and can result in you know pulling the clutch by accident while you're driving or you know simply having a scenario where you can't use the dual stage clutch and also use that function to switch between dash screens now if you take a phonetic wheel by comparison obviously that has its own dedicated tuning menu you have a dedicated button to bring that menu up we don't have such buttons here on this wheel but having said that i'm sure that what they could do is potentially have one of the buttons so that it isn't mapped in the game or maybe having the ability to switch between mappable or not mappable and then having that button switch between the different dashes that would be an easy solution which i'm sure would be achievable through firmware alone so in conclusion guys i am very happy with the fsr wheel overall i think there is a lot of unrealized potential there at the moment but i'm sure that those things will come to fruition over time and we'll see future software and firmware updates that will fix a lot of the things that we've highlighted in today's video so i certainly don't think that it's a bad buy i think if you do buy one of these you may be a little underwhelmed with the dash at least at the time of release but hopefully they'll fix those things up quickly and once they do i think this has the potential to provide a really great balance between functionality and ease of use and i think that's really where the potential lies in this wheel i think if i can get this thing dialed in so it can provide a versatile experience whilst also being easy to use then it will absolutely be a winner so i really hope that today's videos helped you guys out as we said at the start of the video if you do want to pick one of these wheels up or any of the other gear that you've seen in today's video there are some links down in the description below we do also have a five percent off discount code for mozza racing as well so jump down in the description or on our website to check that out and we really appreciate the support that you guys give us through using our affiliate links but above all guys i really hope today's video has been useful for you if it has please do leave a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel as well so you don't miss future videos and we will see you again soon bye

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 165,373

Keywords: moza vs fanatec, fanatec vs moza, Moza R9, best value sim racing wheel, best value direct drive, cheapest direct drive, sim racing wheel, sim racing buyer's guide, boosted media, fanatec racing wheel, fanatec direct drive, CSL DD, CSL DD vs Moza, Moza R16, Moza R21, Moza Direct Drive, Moza Review, Hamilton, Verstappen, Leclerc, best direct drive wheel, fanatec killer, better than fanatec, Moza FSR wheel, moza formula wheel, moza wheel with dash, sim racing wheel with dash

Id: pIDHt0Cru9I

Length: 45min 47sec (2747 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022