REVIEW - Next Level Racing F-GT Elite Sim Racing Cockpit & ES1 Seat

hey guys will here so today i'm very excited to be reviewing the brand new elite cockpit and es1 racing seat from next level racing now this is a product that i've been hassling them to make for a very long time now since way back when i was running the gt track and what we're expecting to see from this is all the benefits that come from an aluminium profile cockpit so adjustability rigidity all those great things as well as some really exciting unique features such as the ability to adjust between a fully reclined formula seating position and an upright gt position and also a hybrid position in there as well so we do have very high expectations for this cockpit it is quite expensive we just quickly run you through some pricing here now so the seat is sold separately 499 australian dollars for that including shipping i don't have overseas pricing for the seat just yet but i'll put some links down in the description where you can find all that information now in terms of the cockpit there are a couple of different additions available there's an eye racing edition which comes with a 12 month eye racing subscription included that is 1299 australian dollars again including shipping now because these will be sold through various different distributors around the world do just check pricing there as well this will vary depending on shipping and things like that as i mentioned in australia it is free shipping so shipping is included in that price then we also have a side mount version as well as a wheel deck version so side mount obviously referring to how we mount the wheelbase that's the version that we're going to be taking a look at today so that comes in at the same price as the eye racing edition so 1299 australian dollars including shipping and same pricing overseas as well then the wheel plate version is 100 or 100 pounds or 100 euros less expensive so we do have a couple of links down in the description for where you can pick these up some of those are affiliate links and we also do have a sneaky five percent discount for you guys down there as well so check that out and uh yeah thank you very much for your support if you do choose to use those affiliate links to help us out with running the channel but yeah guys i have really high expectations for this cockpit today thankfully we do have a really detailed assembly guide already on next level racing's youtube channel so i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time today running through the assembly process we'll time lapse it what i'll do is i'll pause and let you guys know if there's anything that i think needs highlighting any particular standout features or any little traps that we might run into along the way that we think need to be pointed out and clarified for you guys but we're going to spend the majority of our time today testing the cockpit out testing out those different seating positions and finding out whether this is the right cockpit for you so let's get going all right let's put the seat out of the way just for now and talk about the cockpit so first thing i want you guys to know this thing is absolutely heavy as hell so 58 kilogram box does come in a single box these are the inner skin boxes as well the retail packaging so there is an outer box that it comes in as well so you don't have to worry about shipping damage or anything like that that should be perfectly safe i've never had any problems with shipping damage with next level racing here in australia with any of the products that we reviewed but yeah just be aware that it is a very very heavy box so you're probably going to well you're definitely going to need a second person to bring it up to your apartment or lift it upstairs or anything like that but let's slide it into position here get it up against the wall get it opened up and have a look at what we have inside so one of the things that they told me about was this polystyrene packaging that they've used which separates all the individual components and theoretically should make it a lot more easy to put things together we've got a nice chunky instruction manual there too which next level racing has always been really strong with their with their assembly guys i've always said if you can put together something from ikea you can put together a next level racing cockpit but you can see straight away the quality in fact this looks better than the previous manuals that we've seen from next level racing it's been a while since we've reviewed one of their products you can see all the bits and pieces labeled there angle height and distance and yeah this this fills me with confidence straight away and i believe it also comes with with some included tools too so we'll have a look at that in just a moment and as we mentioned before there is a online assembly guide which you can follow which takes you through all the necessary steps but yeah lots of detail there i don't think we're going to have any problems at all so let's set that manual aside for now and let's have a look at what we have in here okay let's flip the lid on this guy very nice so if you compare to some of the other cockpits that we've reviewed here on the channel you would have seen uh bits of metal filing all throughout the profile where it's been chopped you would have seen you know things individually wrapped up and not really labeled very clearly so this is very refreshing to see everything laid out so clearly here you can see a left and right sticker two so we know which side is which i'm assuming that must be important for some reason probably because of the angle that's been cut there so let's just pop a piece out here and have a little look so you can see that really nice carbon gray finish some people might prefer black some people might prefer silver i actually really like this look it's sort of in between the two i guess now one of the things i did mention to them because this is adjustable we do expect to be sliding things around a lot and you can see up here we've actually got some laser etched markings to allow us to fine tune our adjustment now one thing i would recommend if you are going to be assembling one of these we have another video on the channel where i went through some of my recommended tips for putting together an aluminium profile some of the tools that i use to make the job a lot easier so definitely check that out as well put a link up the top of the screen now for you but yeah that looks really nice now just to give you a quick look at the profile itself as well that is the thickness that we're dealing with in here and if we compare that to this is a standard piece of profile that you get with track racer so it is a little bit more solid there you can see the center core is just that little bit thicker and if we compare that to a piece of sim lab profile as well this is the standard thickness that we get with simlab so a little bit chunkier there now i've seen quite a bit of attention online comparing track racer to sim lab so track racer sim lab look to be honest with you guys i've never had any problems with rigidity on any of the cop any of the aluminium profile coppers that we've tested here so look i don't see that being a major contributing factor but for those of you who may be concerned about it you can see a little bit thinner than what we get with sim lab but a little bit thicker than what we get with track racer so it is what it is we've got a sim labs p1x here as well as a track racer tr-160 we've never noticed any difference in the rigidity of the actual profile pieces itself between the two of them so i think this is going to be every bit as solid at least in the pieces of profile itself it's also just going to come down to the way it's all mounted together the bracketry and things like that i think but that's a look at the profile you can also see we've got these holes that are already pre-machined in there as well so it's all been anodised after those kinds of things have been drilled so very very clean let's just pop that out and have a look too so really impressed with the way this is finished it looks very professional there's a couple little bits of polystyrene there it's not some it's not metal shavings or anything like that you can see where the threads have been tapped in and yeah look just a really professionally finished very solid piece of equipment there you can see this one's actually got a little bit of an angle there too so let's pop this top layer off have a look at what we have underneath okay this guy down oh it's heavy okay so we've got our seat mounting brackets so that's actually interesting i wasn't sure whether the seat mounting brackets came with the cockpit or whether they came with the seat so that's good to know if you buy the if you buy the cockpit by itself you're planning to use your own seat you do get these included seat rails and that's really important because obviously we want to be able to adjust between our gt and our formula style seating position so you do need a wide scope of adjustability there which you get with these side rails and those are five millimeters thick including the powder coating so i'm assuming probably four millimeter thick steel allow half a millimeter on either side for the powder coating nice and solid there as well plenty of heft to those a little bit of broken packaging there but we can we can allow for that that's fine you can see how everything's kind of you know put in individually there's no excess plastic or anything like that wrapping everything and yeah really impressed with how this all goes together so have a look at some of the other bracketry as well not sure exactly what that piece is just yet we've got our front mounting plate for our semi cube and mid style motors so that should fit our sim cube 2 our vrs direct force pro midge our sim magic alpha as well should fit that and then we've got some different brackets as well which we saw in the top layer just here which will mount to our dd1 dd2 and i believe the new csl dd2 but we'll check that out a little bit later we have all those wheelbases here so we can check all those out and also included i noticed is a butt kicker bracket too which you can bolt directly to your profile so that's a nice little inclusion and then we've got our shifter and handbrake mount it's got nice wide channels there so you shouldn't have any problems mounting most handbrakes and shifters to that and then we've got a couple of bags here as well which i assume is going to contain all of our mounting hardware so there we go we've got our end caps and actually they look really nice let's just have a quick look at that these are the best ones i've seen so far i really like how they've got the channels cut out so you can actually slide your t-nuts in without having to remove the end caps that's one of the things that's really annoyed me in the past adding accessories to both the track racer tr160 and the p1x so one of the complaints that you do see quite often when it comes to aluminium profile cockpits is that there's not a whole lot of innovation in the space it kind of tends to be a little bit same same so little details like these are things that i like to see little i guess wake up calls for the industry in general so let's pop that back aside and let's have a look at some of the other little bits and pieces that we have here so there's a little mount i believe to slide our tools into so we can have those mounted to the rig some little cable management clips as well so let's pop that out so that slides into your profile channel and then your cables and everything can just click in like that so again this is not the kind of you know these are the things that we haven't seen included with other profile rigs that we've reviewed in the past so really happy to see this attention to detail a little spirit level there as well that's going to help us some little stick on felt pads as well but looks of things we'll obviously figure out what we need those for a little bit later on so some little m8 levers too so instead of having to use a tool to loosen and tighten we can just use a lever so we did see them on the pedal plate for the track racer tr 160 but these are labeled as seat slide handles so that's going to be related to the adjustment for the seat some little spanners other bits and pieces washers and then we've got our little next level racing branded feet too so they've got little stick on felt pads as well so we don't mark our floor what we can do is we can bolt those directly to our profile and then we also have adjustment here too so as we wind it they lift up and down so we can account for any variation in our level of our floor and that should be nice and easy we can just kind of spin the foot underneath and you can see there it actually clicks as it goes so you can count the number of clicks if you want to get the adjustment exactly right so you know just a lot of attention to detail here that i'm seeing so far so far there's nothing here to suggest any corners cut or anything like that it's all very very high quality stuff and yeah i'm really honestly impressed so far so let's pop that back in then we've got another bag here which i assume is going to be all of our mounting hardware so let's just quickly tip that out too yeah there we go so you can see there's quite a bit of oil there next level racing products do tend to have some oil coating on a lot of the bolts so you will just want to be careful if you are assembling this on your mum's carpet that you don't end up staining it i have learned that from experience not my mom's carpet but my carpet so yeah just be careful when you are putting this together but again everything is kind of labeled here so you shouldn't have any dramas finding what's what so a couple of these stickers have fallen off the bags unfortunately so i'm not sure i mean we should be able to sort of figure out what's what and it should be pretty clear once we get into assembling everything anyway so that's a quick run through all the bits and pieces that we get inside the box one thing i should mention as well we do get included in the kit some mounting brackets for the next level racing v3 motion platform which we do have we probably won't test that out in this particular video but we might chuck it on the rig a little bit later on and test that out for you guys but just to run you through here again i did find a page inside the manual that runs through all the various different bits and pieces in picture form and tells you exactly what you have and what's what so as we mentioned before some of the stickers had come off the bags but you can identify what's what very clearly just from looking at the pictures here so again just the attention to detail is absolutely fantastic here now one other thing to have a look at here as well is the t-nuts that they include because these make a big difference to the convenience of installing accessories as well as the initial build so these are i'm very happy to say the spring ball type which are my favorite type of t-nuts they are coated as well which is nice so it means they match the profile quite nicely you're not going to have little bits of silver showing through so these are great because what you can do is you can slide them in from the ends but you can also pop them in to the channels very easily too so you just go in push them flat and they pop into position so it means that you don't have to pull the profile apart to pop things in after the event should you wish to add an accessory later on and you can pop them out very easily as well you just pop them like so so comparing this quickly to some other types we have on the market this is what we get with sim labs so exactly the same spring ball type now you can see if we have a look at the profile side by side the channels around about the same depth between the two so this the spring ball type that we get with sim lab should also work yep there we go so those sim lab accessories will work on the next level racing cockpit and vice versa should you happen to have one now if we compare that to what we get with track racer and some other cockpit bands these are what i call a leaf spring style so they do still sit securely in the channels and we'll grab a piece of track racer profile here so you can see again that does slide in it's a little bit more tricky to put into place but you can do it and again once that's in position it does sit snugly so it's not going to move around on you which is great these are a lot more tricky to slide in after the event though so you kind of got to pop it in and then it is quite difficult to do just with your bare hands so you can get an allen key or a screwdriver or something and kind of pry it into position so it does work and sometimes you'll find they're easier to pop in than other times but i did find when i was assembling the track racer tr-160 and some other cockpits that we've tested that use this style a lot more fiddly a lot more fidgety and a lot more frustrating to use overall so i do definitely prefer these spring ball types and i'm really glad to see them used on the elite so i think that's everything we need to cover just in terms of a quick glance at all the bits and pieces let's get into the process of putting it together now as i said before we'll time lapse this for you guys we'll stop if we come across anything particularly remarkable anything that we think needs covering in more detail but again do check out the next level racing assembly guide on their youtube channel we'll put a link down in the description for you guys let's get this thing put together and then we can get into some proper testing so we've started our assembly process here just wanted to highlight a difference between the two different styles of t-nuts which we have in the kit we've got our full width style as they're calling them and then the style that we had looked at before which we can load in from the side after the event so the first step in the assembly process is actually to slide these larger style t-nuts into position so if you have a look at these ones you can see compared to the other ones they're a lot thicker these ones are so thick that you can't slot them in from the top so you actually do need to slide them in from the sides before you start the assembly process it's not a problem because it's not something that you're ever going to need to change anyway and if you do want to mount any other accessories you can of course use these ones later on the reason they go with this style is just a little bit more sturdiness basically it means that they can't twist or rotate inside the channel so it just adds a little bit of extra rigidity for those main parts so the wheel deck the pedal deck the seat mounts and bits and pieces like that so the instructions if we have a quick look here call out the rough positions for where we should have those t-nuts on either side you'll notice there's an optional note here on either side for t-nuts to install our shifter on either side what i would recommend there is enough t-nuts in the bag to allow us to mount that on either side so what i would suggest is have them in position on both sides so that way you can choose whether you want to change from left to right with your shifter depending on what kind of car you're driving you're not going to have to pull everything apart to get those in later on after the event because obviously once you've bolted stuff in you're not going to be able to get these t-nuts in past it now if you do run into a drama you can of course just use these ones it's not really the end of the world but you know better to be thinking ahead of time and that's one of the things that we called out in our video where we went through some fundamentals for putting an aluminium profile rig together the more you kind of think ahead the more you kind of i guess prepare yourself for things that you're going to be doing multiple steps ahead the easier the installation process is so that's all done so before we move on just wanted to show you the tools that they include in the kit as well it should be everything that you need what we did find is we did have to use a pair of pliers just to pinch down the little sides on some of these wide t-nuts we found that they wouldn't slide through the channels we just had to squeeze them with a pair of pliers wasn't a big deal at all but just one thing that we did run into just one tiny little snag but we get a allen key here for m8 bolts allen key for m6 bolts two little heads for the same thing as well and then also a little tiny ratchet tool which is actually pretty decent quality here pretty good little ratchet you can make it go in either direction and then a little spanner as well this is actually something i'm probably going to find useful for a lot of other things so yeah handy that they include all those bits and pieces but let's go ahead now the next bit we need to do is install the side bolts that go through into the tapped threads in our profile here get everything put together in that way nice and square and yeah [Music] so [Music] okay so we've got the pedal plate mounted here in a more gt style position just to begin with now there's no measurements for the for the arms that are supporting the front part of the plate here so we do have measurements along the top here you can see and that is for a position of the petals along there so what we've done is we've sort of just squared up one side in an arbitrary position where we think it's probably going to be about right for a gt style position what we then want to do is replicate this same measurement on this on the opposing side so what i like to do is use this set square tool again if you've watched my other video where i went through tips for setting up an aluminium profile cockpit you'd already be familiar with this what i do is i go from a known point so from the end here i'm just going to measure to the center of the bolt so like so and then lock it down and then when we go around to the other side all we need to do is use that exact same measurement slide it forward and there we go now we are going to be moving things around a little bit so we're not too worried about it being absolutely exact but the closer you can get things just you know roughly when you're setting things up the less problems you have later on when you're moving things around because if things aren't square then you're going to end up having to pull stuff apart and start again with with various sections of the rig so try to use the measurements what we've found so far is you know just lining things up against these measurement marks on the profile rigs made it a lot easier than what we've experienced before previously when we've set up rigs we've had to use this for pretty much every single thing that we put on so these have made things a lot easier but yeah taking taking the time to get it right from the um from the outset like this saves you a lot of heartache later on so i definitely recommend paying attention and so far one other thing i would like to note is the fact that we haven't had any scratches appear at all when we've been moving things around we have we you know we have been being very careful we haven't just sort of been throwing stuff on but yeah we haven't as we've slid things around we haven't created any scratches on the anodizing or anything like that so yeah so far so good [Music] so rig is all together now apart from the seat obviously which is a separate and optional accessory so let's just quickly run through what we have here we obviously haven't mounted the mount for our wheelbase yet either because we're going to do that a little bit later on once we've got it down on the ground but look i mean the assembly process was really straightforward there were no major issues there were a couple of little nitpicks and a couple little things which i think they can improve on which we'll run through in just a moment let's start off with the good things in terms of measuring things and assembling very very simple because of these lines and everything that we have marked out so we can kind of line things up and get things in a rough position to where we want them now we are obviously going to move things around once we get our hardware mounted pedals and everything one of the concerns that i do have and i'm sure this isn't something that's an oversight it's just something that we're going to have to do some adjustment around it seems like the wheel deck is going to be very very very close to the seat and there's not really a whole lot of scope of movement to move the seat any further back you can imagine if the wheelbase is ending here add that much for the wheel and you're going to be here so we're going to have to move everything else forward obviously there are markings to sort of indicate that the wheel deck can go forward to about there so that's obviously going to end up stipulating how we organize this i'm guessing what we're probably going to end up doing is lifting this up having those mounts further down and having them fixed up somewhere around here or something like that but we'll figure all that out once we're up and running and we've got all our other hardware mounted but look in terms of scratching and everything like i said as well we didn't have any problems with any of the parts scratching up the profile as we were moving things around we did have included some little felt pads that we put in some areas where we were told to so underneath the seat rails here so as we loosen these off we can slide the seat forward and back and that's not going to scratch up the profile on the top there there wasn't anything to go under the sides here so we may end up seeing some scrapes on the side of the profile but at least on the top we're not going to have any problems you look otherwise very simple to assemble it all seems to be nice and rigid as well everything is nice and thick where it needs to be and really nothing problematic in regards to assembly whatsoever now just a couple of little nitpicks that i did have we went through the inventory here and everything that's supposed to be included in the kit a couple of things we noticed in our particular box the m8 regular t-nuts included in the box so we did actually end up running out we had to use some of the wide ones to mount this guy here we were 10 short compared to what we should have had in the inventory i'd like to see more than that included obviously one of the advantages of an aluminium profile rig is it's really easy to bolt stuff on you don't want to have to be going and ordering extra t-nuts they are a little bit difficult to get your hands on it's not something you can just run down to a hardware store and buy so yeah i would like to see them include at least sort of 20 spare i think so that's one little improvement just in terms of end plates as well this is one other nitpick that i did have putting it together we had spares for the end pieces which is great obviously if they get damaged they're going to be a difficult thing to replace you'd have to call up next level racing not something you can just buy off the counter elsewhere there weren't any endplates included for these bottom parts here though now i did check once again through the inventory just to make sure we weren't missing anything but no they don't include any endplates for here now that is very very sharp if you were to trip over and kick that remembering again this is on the floor so it is something that you could snag your foot on quite easily that is enough that could do you a pretty serious injury if you kicked your foot on it so as you can see on here it's not a problem we've got a cover and the work covers included for every other area where there's exposed profile except for these bottom parts here so both sides that is definitely something i think they should include because that is a that is a safety risk in my opinion i know i'm a bit soft but you know these are the kinds of things we need to call out look otherwise really really easy we've got cable management around the side here as well so just pop one of these out so you can see we had a whole bag full of these you can see there so plenty of cable management and these just simply slot in like so nice and easy one other thing i did notice if i come around the front this little included tool holder quite rattly so i can imagine if you've got this on a motion rig or even a strong wheelbase you're probably not going to want to put your spannery ratchety thing in there because that's going to just drive your nuts rattling around it's a cool idea but yeah it needs to be a bit more of a snug fit to really be practical i think shift amount is a little bit crammed the way we have it now and because this piece isn't any longer i can't really see any way to mitigate that there is the option of having a mount along the side here as i mentioned before though which should which should alleviate that issue so we'll experiment with that a little bit later on and yeah i think that's pretty much it just a couple of other accessories to go over here as well so these are the side mounting pieces for the next level racing motion platform v3 so what you would do is you would take this whole assembly off mount these on instead these simply bolt onto the sides then the motion platform screws into the side here and it does include all the screws and bits and pieces that you need to do that so that's a nice inclusion and if you notice here these holes along here i wasn't sure exactly what they were for then i realized these are the exact same layout as the mounting points for the traction loss platform so these bolts that are also included in the kit what they do is they drop straight through there that allows you to bolt this rig directly to the traction loss platform if you do own one of those so that's nice that they have the provision to just mount that straight on that's really handy should you have one of those and you know again that's something that we might experiment with a little bit later on we do have a motion platform v3 and the traction loss system on our main rig so we may end up mounting this a little bit later on once we've done all the other testing now one other accessory we mentioned earlier on when we're going through the box is the butt kicker mount so you can see that mounted up underneath here on the seat rail that's going to allow the maximum amount of vibration to come through to the seat so we're not getting too much dampening so that's good as well so next step now is to unbox the seat we'll take a good look at that i'm actually really excited about the seat because it's quite similar to my lusso motors mark ii seat that i have on the main rig so it'd be interesting to see how they compare we'll get that mounted up we'll get it all down on the ground get a wheelbase mounted up too look at the adjustment between different seating positions try to set up for a comfortable seating position in both gt and formula we'll look at the amount of time it takes to switch between the two as well to see whether it's something that's actually practical to do just switching between cars or whether it's kind of like choose one and leave it and yeah that we can get into some rigidity and driving tests okay es1 seat reveal take out the ceiling there we go that's pretty nice i think the um the painted finish isn't quite is it painted no i think it's just plastic finish not quite up to the same standard as my lusso motors seat but i mean for the price it cost half as much landed as what the lusso motors seat cost me so you know i didn't have super super high expectation but this is actually you know better than i expected it would be just in terms of the you know the quality of the material the cushiness and everything too it's nice and wide too and i think that you know it's got enough cut away on the sides one of the problems i had if we come over here just quickly one of the problems i have with my lusso motors seat is my elbows tend to bang into the sides of it when i'm steering i had to kind of adjust my posture just to stop my elbows from hitting the seat all the time so it'll be interesting to see whether i do have the same problem in this one i suspect i probably won't these seem to cut away a little bit more than they do on the other seat but yeah i mean it all seems to go together pretty nicely you've got mounting points on the bottom here for seat rails i will be mounting it from the sides here so weight wise including the box and everything 17.3 kilos i weighed it on its own at about 16 kilograms give or take that's just me standing on the scale holding it versus me standing on the scales without holding it to measure the weight uh so yeah not the lightest seat in the world by any means but certainly not the heaviest obviously it is intended to be used with the motion platform v3 and the traction loss system so it shouldn't tip the total system over the weight limit and yet most other full motion systems are capable of much higher weights than that is anyway so i don't see that being a problem and yeah look overall quite impressed with it so quick tip for installing the seat really important to make sure that you've got it perfectly centered on the rig obviously if it's not in the center or if it's slightly twisted that's going to throw your posture out and it can cause all sorts of other issues later on down the track so again we like to use the adjustable set square tool thing and we do have a link down in the description for these on amazon as well if you want to pick one of these up definitely recommend you can pick these up from a local hardware store as well but they're pretty cheap on amazon so what i've done is i've dropped the seat into the correct position not worrying about the height adjustment just yet and then we push the rails in on the sides so that they're aligned correctly then what we're doing is we're making sure we've got the exact same measurement front to rear to make sure that our alignment's correct and then also from side to side as well so if we go on this side we should have exactly the same measurement from the edge of the profile here as our reference point to where the bracket sits so exactly the same there exactly the same there and same same so once you've got that and you're happy with it we're going to take the seat back out again and secure these bolts down here so it doesn't move again one other tip when you're securing the side rails the washers that come included with the seat have a sort of smoothed off side where they've been punched and a more sharp side too so given that this is meant to be adjusted you are meant to be able to adjust between gt and formula you're going to end up with scrape marks on the outside of your powder coating if you go with the sharp side down so what i'd recommend is just pay attention to that when you install it make sure you've got the flatter side up against the paint that way you're going to minimize the amount of scratching that happens it probably will still scratch a little bit but it's just going to make it a little bit less so we'll do the opposing side exactly the same and then we've also got our seat belt which we're going to install too so that is a four point so it's going to go across your lap bolts in from the back here in the same point where you screw into the seat it goes across the lap and that goes up over the shoulders and bolts into the back of the chair on either side like that now we had the exact same seat belts on the gt track rig i did find that the shoulder adjustments so these ones here did tend to slip a little bit over time so we'll definitely pay attention to that once we go for a drive in this as well but um yeah we'll see how it goes now just um for reference as well what we ended up doing uh rather than using that same seat belt on the main riggers we ended up getting a proper actual approved sparco four point so essentially exactly the same design but i didn't have any problems with slippage with this one wherever you adjust it it ends up staying there but again remembering for the price that seat belt alone was i think about 250 dollars so you know you are getting what you pay for these are the little um these are little sacrifices that you make when you're including stuff like this but just on the subject of seat belts a lot of people ask why you would have a seat belt on a static rig now what i find it does add a little bit to the immersion because you feel the pressure on your shoulders obviously there's no sort of tensioning system installed on this rig we did actually end up doing something along those lines for our motion rig on here using little bungee cords so as the as the seat mover moves forward it puts tension on the shoulders and we have a video dedicated to exactly how we did that so i'd recommend checking that out but once you get over feeling silly for wearing a seatbelt in a sim rig it actually does benefit your driving style what i find is it keeps your shoulders restricted obviously so it kind of stops you from driving with your shoulders like this what i find often when i'm not using seat belts i tend to turn like that and lean into it with my shoulders whereas when i've got the seatbelt on i'm having to drive correctly with my arms not using my shoulders at all so i do find that makes me a little bit more consistent on track you may not find that but for me it does make a bit of a difference which is why i generally wear the seatbelt even if i don't have the motion platform turned on so yeah let's get that installed now and then we can get the wheelbase installed and get into some flexibility tests so we just run into our first installation issue with the rig when we were down to the last few bolts that we need to install so just come in a little bit closer on the side here i'll show you what's going on uh so as i mentioned before the seat belt that comes with this is originally from the gt track or the i think may have had one as well i can't remember but anyway on the on those rigs the seat belt actually bolts to the side i guess equivalent to here on that there's enough clearance here that it's not a problem it just kind of bolts in and it's fine on here if you come in from the back here you can see without any washers underneath here if we install it the way it shows on the manual so one washer on the front one washer on the back it doesn't actually work at all so it's pinching in here we're going to either end up bending the metal or scratching the crap out of our seat which we don't want to do so all i'm going to do is i'm just going to grab a couple of m8 washers from the packet that came with the rig so it's not a major issue but yeah just going to have to space that out a little bit just to make that seat belt clear so it's not rubbing up against here if we had the seat up higher obviously it would clear it wouldn't be a problem but if we got the seat any lower it is going to snag there so we'll sort that out not a major issue but just something again they do need to include some sort of a spacer i think in the kit just to mitigate that issue so just installing the seat belt brackets on the back now a couple of things here first of all if we have a look at the inventory we were supposed to have six m8 20mm bolts and six m8 washers we only got four in the little packet so we don't have the hardware we need to do it thankfully we did have enough 16mm bolts left over from the build of the rig which should work just fine i don't think they need to be 20mm long you can see the threads stick out pretty fast that shouldn't be an issue now one other thing i just want to highlight here as well you can see the holes on these again they're designed for a different rig so they just flop around inside you need some sort of an insert in there to actually make that suitable for an m8 bolt i think because again that's just going to kind of slide around and it just kind of feels like a bit of an afterthought to be honest it's uh yeah not up to the quality of the rest of the rig let's just say which is the reason why i'm calling it out okay so yeah unfortunately this seat belt is a bit of a fail now i mean obviously it's going to depend on your body size but you can see here on the sides i've got this tightened up as far as it will possibly go and it's still got about four inches there so unless you're a lot bigger than me you're not going to be able to use this seat belt same deal with the shoulders as well we can actually make that work just by tightening it down like that but then you've got the metal brackets which are supposed to be behind you sitting on top of your shoulders and it's extremely uncomfortable so again depending on your body size you may be able to get away with it but for me the seat belt is not usable and obviously not designed to be used with this with this chair i think so yeah that is that's quite disappointing because that's an obvious oversight in the design as i said before this is this works fine with the gt track with the exception of the shoulder pads sliding over time so yeah it's just it's designed to be fixed further down on on the front and back the belts are just too long for their intended purpose on this particular seat so yeah i'm going to take the seat belt back off there's no point in even trying to use it for the rest of the review so time to have a look now at the various mounting options available for the side mount version of this cockpit remembering as well we do have the wheel deck version 2. now the wheel deck version would be the best choice for things like a csl elite a clubsport wheelbase 2.5 or any other belt driven or cog driven wheelbase so thrust master logitech and so forth may also be the better choice for the csl dd as well but we're going to explore that in just a moment we do have the option of side mounting this guy as well but does require a little bit of fiddling around so we'll look at that in just a moment but for the dd1 dd2 or small midge simucube 2 simicube1 simagic alpha alpha mini and so forth anything that front mounts you're definitely going to want to go with the side mount version of this cockpit so let's start off by having a look at how a semi cube or small midge or sim magic and a like would mount so we simply have our motor the bracket is going to drop on top like so and you can see we've got these slots here which are going to line up with the majority of motors on the market so just check the next level racing website for complete compatibility just to make absolutely sure it's going to fit your motor but this will absolutely fit with the sim cube 2s the small mid motor and i'm pretty sure the sim magic alpha and alpha mini unfortunately we don't have any here that we can test but shouldn't be a problem so these are simply going to drop through like so and then we put the bolts and washers on the back now one thing i did just notice is you've got these little holes here which presumably are to mount accessories and bits and pieces like that similar to what we have on the front of the dd2 as we can see here and the csld these aren't threaded though so we're not going to be able to mount any accessories unless we can bolt in from the back or put a nut on the back which obviously we can't on the small image that we have here same deal with the simicube 2 as well it's too big to be able to get in behind there and mount anything so yeah it'd be good to see maybe an m6 thread tapped onto these just so it's easy to mount in from the front like what we have with the dd1 and the csl and just to note as well this is five millimeter thick steel including the powder coating so probably a four millimeter thick steel underneath the powder coating but anyway let's slide that guy aside and let's quickly have a look at how we mount our dd2 and dd1 and the csl dd so we've got these included anodized metal brackets which are eight millimeters thick and those are also available in the blue version too if you go with the iracing model and all we need to do is just drop those into position facing backwards we then grab an included dd washer which is just a little nylon m8 washer or two of them i should say drop it in drop it in again grab our m8 low profile dd mount only bolts which are included in the kit as well and again these do fit with our included allen key which i just conveniently grabbed off the little tool chest on the side of the rig [Music] bolt that down and then we're going to do exactly the same thing obviously on the other side as well now when it comes to the csl dd a little bit more complex and there's a couple of little things that i want to make sure are very clear here so the csldd as those who own one would know comes with m6 t-nuts included with the base itself you get four of them and you can use those for mounting from the side as well as mounting on the base so we can actually replicate the exact same mounting pattern from the bottom as we have with the csl elite or club support wheelbase 2.5 or we can also replicate exactly the same thing as we have on the dd1 dd2 except with m6 instead of m8 so we're going to grab our metal bracket exactly the same one as we used for the dd2 sit that on there and you can see because this is designed for m8 bolts but we have m6 if we were to put our washers on there and then use an m6 bolt we're going to run into two issues so first issue is that we now have this play in here so even if we tighten this down we introduce the ability for this to move around and cause a whole bunch of flex which we don't want other issue and remember we are sticking to just using the included hardware here we don't want to have to go to a hardware store to buy anything is the head of the bolt isn't going to sit flush with the bracket which means we're not actually going to be able to mount this into our rig so that's not going to work for us so thankfully we do have a solution to this problem and we don't need to run to a hardware store so thankfully fanatec have made these channels a pretty universal size so what we can do is we can take two of our full-size m8 t-nuts that came included with the cockpit we can slide those in and now we can mount it in exactly the same way as we mounted the dd-1 so we're just going to slide those back just a touch we're going to drop in our nylon washers once again exactly the same as we did before our included low profile m8 bolts now before we tighten this down there is one more thing that we need to account for and that is if we flip this over you can see on the opposing side we do have a little issue with the power button taking up some of that channel which is a bit of a interesting design from fanatex so we'll pop the t-nut in there and we're just going to need to measure exactly how far back we are here to make sure we're lined up on both sides obviously we're going to mount the bracket on this side too so we'll just slide it back to the same distance and we're good to tighten down so we'll get the csl dd mounted up on the rig see what kind of flex we have we'll have a look at the front mount for the small midge and symbicube style mount as well and then we'll have a look we'll probably do bulk of our driving test with the dd2 i think today that'll allow us to crank the force feedback all the way up to 25 newton meters and see what the driving experience is like so let's get this installed and let's get testing okay so because we have the luxury of two people here we are able to do it this way what i would recommend is if you are on your own mount these pieces to the side of your wheelbase before you place it on gravity is your friend and it's going to be a lot easier to kind of drop the whole thing on and then bolt it in like this then try to hold the wheelbase in place while you get bolts in from the side so that is my recommendation there but if i get tom to come in with the wheelbase now you can see four holes or two different mounting positions so an upper position and a lower position there's a 15 millimeter gap between the holes there or 15 millimeter spacing so we can adjust the height by 15 millimeters so we're going to just get that roughly in position here we're gonna go with the top hole for now and get a dd mount gonna break tom's back here quick okay i think it's safe to let go now yep you're good yes all right so you can see that was pretty tricky even with two people doing it this way so i definitely recommend mount these on first then put it on the rig that way you can kind of sit it in place and just screw it in so we'll get this aligned and get those top screws tightened in then we've obviously got the bottom screws which we can put into and that allows us heaps of angle adjustment there so let's just get one of those in place quickly on the side so you can see for yourselves just let that dangle there and get that in place so huge amount of adjustability there so i mean obviously in the formula position you're going to ultimately have that tilted down just a little bit but i mean i can't see any scenario where you'd want to have that much upright maybe if you're doing euro truck sim or something like that maybe but yeah for the majority of people there is more than enough adjustment range there so we spent a bit of time adjusting things around and getting what i think is a pretty ideal gt seating position for me happy to say that i'm very very comfortable here the steering wheel is in exactly the right spot for me i feel like the pedals are going to be in exactly the right spot when we mount those too we'll probably end up sliding these panels forward a little bit but that's fine we've got the scope of adjustability to be able to achieve that and yes seat is very very comfortable sitting in here i'm not having any problems with my elbows hitting the side either there's plenty of clearance there if that were a problem i could push the wheel back a little bit further and that would bring my arms up a little bit straighter than they are but what we have here is very comfortable and the seat in particular is very nice and snug for my body shape at least and i think for anybody bigger as well because you know bigger people tend to sort of be more out the front there's enough of a sort of bucket here that it's nice and snug on the sides but you know not so much that you feel like you're too enclosed in so i think this is a really clever design that i've gone with here and even just in terms of adjusting when we were moving things up and down we didn't have any problems with cross threading or the inserts being difficult to work with sometimes when they're going into fiberglass or even fiberglass reinforced plastic or frp they can be very difficult they can move and they can even break off and drop off inside we actually had that happen on the gt ultimate seat that we had from next level racing so this is definitely an upgrade in terms of the quality very easy to work with plenty of adjustability here too we've actually got another hole underneath this one on the front too so we could actually go another inch and a half or two inches higher on the seat again if we wanted to and we'd still have plenty of room to move so yeah really impressed so far so let's talk about flex now so we've got our csldd mounted with our porsche 911 gt3 r wheel and of course using the side mount as we went through before so pulling up and down on that you can see there's a little bit of flex there it's not completely solid but most of what you're seeing in the wheel there is that little bit of play that we looked at when we looked at the csl dd in more detail but what i want you to pay attention to is the movement here where the wheelbase is because that's really what's relevant to the rig so there's a little tiny bit of movement there but i'm pulling on that pretty darn hard i'd say it's probably about on par with what we had with the front mount kit with the sim labs p1x definitely less than we had with the default and the updated track racer front mount that came with the tr160 uh absolutely way way way way less flex than something like a gt track or a so this is definitely an upgrade i think the the simcore um1 mount that we use on our p1x is definitely a little bit more solid than this is but there's not a whole lot in it and i don't think that that amount of flex is going to be a problem for anybody we'll talk about it again when we go for a drive with the dd2 in just a minute yeah impress there as well and there's plenty of leg clearance there too i thought that maybe we might have issues with this being too close to my legs but at least for me in what i would consider to be a comfortable gt style seating position very comfortable and i can imagine once we get our legs up high for a formula as well that's not going to be a problem so yeah just i think the more we the more we dig into this the more we're kind of exploring it and the more we're unpacking it the more we're kind of realizing all those little areas where they have paid attention to detail and they've kind of thought ahead and yeah we're not really uncovering any problems at all so fast so just for the sake of completeness quick test with the front mount small midge or simicube some magic mount too so exactly the same as what we had with the csld which is what i expected but if we twist on that you'll see there's actually more flex in the wheel itself than there is in the mount so again i don't see this being a problem for anybody you can see just having a closer look at it most of the flex appears to be just from you know the whole platform kind of raising and lowering i can see a little bit in here so that the joint between here and here it's just kind of raising up and down but yeah i really like i don't want to hop on about it because i don't think it's enough that it's going to bother anybody so we've covered everything that we need to with mounting the wheel deck you can see we've got the dd2 on there now we'll obviously talk about that a little bit more when we go for a drive in just a moment but i wanted to focus on the pedal deck and pedal mounting area now i'm sure most of you by now i've seen next level racing's video where they were kind of jumping and standing on this and i know this is the area where a lot of people had concerns including myself just around you know how sturdy this was going to be obviously seeing the amount of adjustment that they have with these side plates kind of makes it look like it might not be particularly rigid so i'm going to do exactly what they did in the video i'm going to stand up on it and if you look my hands aren't touching anything so all of my weight is on this and i can literally jump on that that's pretty darn cool even in the middle if i put all my weight in the middle i'm not feeling i mean i don't know what you guys can see on camera but i'm certainly not feeling like my life is in any danger the only thing i would say i notice is a little bit of side to side twist there now we will do this test again once we're in the formula seating position as well just to make absolutely sure there's no sacrifices there but a little bit of side to side movement probably not something that we're going to notice when we're driving because obviously we're pushing longitudinally when we're braking and accelerating and all those things so yeah i um i'm actually really shocked i thought i thought that there was going to be a lot more flex than that so yeah so what we're going to do now is get the pedals mounted up now i'm going to given the fact that this does appear to be so sturdy i'm going to give this probably the worst case scenario test we do have the v3 pedals here as well but i'm going to mount my sim tag black pedals which are hydraulic pedals these are the most heavy duty pedals i own but just to give you an idea of how this works you've got your three slots along the top here so regardless of what pedals you have if you've got v3s for example you just mount through the three holes literally just line it up slide this into the correct position to line up with the holes and you're good to go and literally all you need to do is drop four m8 bolts through put some nuts on the bottom and that is as simple as that now in the case of the sim tags there's just lining them up dropping them on putting the bolts through and we'll be good sim tag black pedals all mounted up now so this is what i would consider an absolute worst case scenario for this rig so i want to be mean to it because i want to give you an idea of you know what kind of flex you can expect if you were to do something like this in an extreme case so as you can see the heel plate is quite a way back from any reinforcement there's nothing underneath here supporting that so we have all that leverage when i rest my heels on there and you can see there's a little bit of flex there but that's actually just the heel plate itself flexing on the pedals it's nothing to do with the rig itself it's just purely a byproduct of the fact that there's no support underneath it so we're not too worried about that for the context of the review but the thing that i'm interested in seeing here is because we don't have any extra reinforcement in the form of a pedal plate that sits across the surface of this all of that energy when i break is all going to be pushed right into the center of these pieces which is going to be a really good test to see whether those have any bend or flex in them whatsoever so under normal braking conditions that is about the amount of pressure that i would use for 100 braking with abs so about there if i really get into it and really twist it you can see things get a little bit more crazy but that's that's unnecessary that's unrealistic because you'd never be breaking that hard in real life anyway i don't believe like i i think even the heaviest footed person driving you know you're never going to push harder than than that so you can see or at least what i'm seeing from here it looks like the front piece is lifting up a little bit and the bottom piece is dipping down a little bit i can also see a little tiny bit of flex just overall in the entire assembly kind of dipping forward a bit so i'd say if you had a if you had a pedal arrangement similar to this you'd probably want to get a couple of pieces of 4080 cut to the right length to go between instead of using these guys but again worst case scenario here and yeah look i i think that that's acceptable it's about what i expected under this kind of worst case scenario in fact maybe even a little bit better than i expected i don't want to make excuses for it there is a little bit of flex there make a cup one pedal mounted now this is a much more realistic scenario you can see we now have a pivot point where my foot is pushing on the brake right between the two support bars so all the force is taking place in between these two and what we can see now when i push on that pedal with about the same amount of force as i was before these pedals don't require quite the force of the sim tags but pushing all the way to there i can see maybe a millimeter of flex on the base twisting downwards i don't know what tom can see there what can you see yeah so i mean we're not seeing that dipping in the front like we could before it's just spreading that load more evenly across and remember we are still using standoffs here as well so it's not actually ideal ideally we would want to have the plate mounted directly flush to this but because we have the bolts coming through from the bottom on these because they're not countersunk as we called out in the review of the mecha cup ones if they were countersunk we better have that completely flush but we can't but yeah look i i'd say that is absolutely fine there's no hesitation there whatsoever there's no reason for concern at all so let's talk a little bit about shifter and handbrake mounting now so there's two configurations available obviously this is one of them so we've got a piece going across and a piece going down for reinforcement and this obviously does add some additional rigidity to the wheel deck as well so when i'm pulling up and down on the wheel i didn't notice that the left hand side with without that reinforcement was flexing any more than the right hand side but what we will do in a moment is pull this off reconfigure it in the other pattern which is basically a piece of profile bolted to the side of the seat rail and then one coming up and that allows you to get your mounting plate a little bit lower and a little bit closer to your side but let's talk about the plate first of all it bolts on in two positions on either side so one two and then two on the opposing side too so you're not going to have any issues with twist does of course have adjustment as well so you can rotate it as well as raise it up and down to your preference and in the front here you can see we've got a couple of different options so what i've got here beside me is assortment of various different handbrakes and shifters that i just happen to have in the studio with me at this point in time we'll firstly talk about the fanatec shifter and handbrake don't have those on hand at the moment but the shifter just literally just bolts directly from the bottom straight through the plate and then the shifter can mount onto the side of that you guys can look at our other videos where we've covered those in details before now just in terms of some other popular ones here thrustmaster handbrake slash sequential shifter you can see that has threads on the bottom and those coincide perfectly with the holes on here so you can imagine if that were mounted the handle is going to be about here so that's nice and convenient we also have the th8a so that can mount on like so that is going to make it a little bit more tricky to mount a handbrake as well you probably have to have it on this side now look my initial gut feeling was that it might be a little bit too far over to the right or the left hand side if you were to mount this on the left but it's pretty comfortable there it's a bit more of a reach than i'd really like but i feel like my muscle memory would get used to that pretty quickly so not really a problem but again i think i'd probably prefer to have that mounted down a little bit lower and a little bit closer to me we'll just have a quick look at a few other options here too obviously we can't cover every single combination but this should give you a good idea of what you can and can't do at least at a basic level so take that guy off so we've got the bj sim racing shifter unfortunately the spacing for the mounting on this is a little bit too wide so you are going to be limited to mounting this directly to profile unless you want to drill some extra holes in the mounting plate of course the hand brake though does actually line up so these line up perfectly with the holes on this side or you can also line them up with the holes on this side too if you wish to do so so that does work quite conveniently but i mean obviously it's a little bit too far away when it's mounted this way it's kind of in line here and you know most load cell handbrakes are going to have the same problem so if you've got this mounted in this location you can bring it a little bit further back you can bring it you can see here before it interferes with this piece of profile so you can go probably about an inch and a half further back than what we have it still not really far enough to this to be in exactly the right spot you really kind of want it to be about here you know roughly in line with your wheel a little bit further forward than you will maybe so again i'd say probably going to end up wanting to mount this low down here so i think that pretty much covers we've got the akina and pike's shifter and handbrake here too again they don't quite line up with the holes but you can't expect them to be able to you know make the holes suit every single bespoke shifter and handbrake that are out there but this is kind of in a pretty good position there i think that's pretty convenient again probably want to have a little bit further back and then we've got the handbrake as well which obviously isn't going to line up with the holes you would mount that directly to profile but again just a little bit kind of out of the way there so yeah what i would recommend i think if you're setting this up for the first time and you are wanting to mount a shifter or a handbrake i'd probably go with the configuration that sees the profile mounted directly off the seat rail to begin with if you're not happy with that position then switch to this one rather than the other way around i just feel like that's going to ultimately land things in a slightly more convenient and more realistic position as well remembering that for most street cars your shifter and your handbrake are kind of next to you rather than up here it's only really for you know your v8 supercars rallycross style cars drift cars and things like that that you're going to want to have them right up next to the wheel so this is the other configuration with a piece of profile bolted directly to the side of the seat rail now one thing to note here if you are switching to formula seating position you are going to end up running into problems because obviously as the seat swivels down this is going to end up lower and it's going to end up down in this area now you're probably not going to have a shifter and handbrake mounted if you're driving a formula car anyway unless it's an old-school style formula car like a lotus or something like that so just be aware of that you might need to get a little bit creative with sliding things around and moving things around when you're switching seating positions now in terms of the positioning here i think this is a lot more suitable for street car style driving conventional kind of road racing things like that obviously rally and stuff like that you might want to have the shifter as we had before but for the th8a you're probably going to want to slide things forward a little bit more obviously you can do that you do have the scope to move this forward a little bit more for other shifters like say the pikes for example that's pretty much exactly where i want it so that's a good position now when it comes to other hardware really you're just going to have to get creative obviously the thrustmaster sequential does bolt straight on in the right position so that is good to go and where we have it now is pretty much exactly where i want to have that if i were using it fanatex shifter as well you might want to have that a little bit lower remembering it is quite tall so what you would need to do is just loosen those drop the whole assembly down and you'd be good to go outside of that you may have to just get a little bit creative with using bits of profile bracketry and stuff like that you do of course have this piece of left over profile from the previous configuration which you can use so you could mount it side by side to allow you to mount a shifter down nice and low one problem you do have with this configuration is because this piece of profile is right up against the seat you are going to be limited in what you're able to mount directly to it so say for example we wanted to have a shifter down nice and low like that you would have to have a second piece of profile just to get it out of the way so look i mean i know most people that are used to using profile rigs are going to look at that and they're going to go yeah well you kind of expect that i know that this particular product is marketed more towards people that are just going to buy the rig and expect it to be able to do everything and you know profile and tnuts and things like that aren't things that you can just pick up from a local hardware store so that's the reason why i think it's important to kind of just cover what you can and can't do straight out of the box so that covers everything we need to in terms of the hardware for now i think the next thing to do now is jump in go for a drive in gt and then we'll talk a little bit more about switching between the different driving positions i know a lot of people are going to be interested to know just how difficult it is whether it's something that's actually practical to do just when you feel like jumping in a different style car so we'll cover that we'll go for a drive in formula 2 and then wrap up with our conclusions [Music] [Music] so just spent about half an hour driving around in a range of different gt style cars just kind of taking everything in and seeing if anything jumped out at me and i'm happy to say all the observations that we've had when we're putting everything together and we're kind of doing our flex tests and all those things have pretty much turned out to be exactly the impression when driving it as well so there's not really a whole lot to cover here in the gt style driving position i didn't notice any flex in the wheel deck at all when i was driving pedals felt nice and solid exactly the same as they do on my p1x cockpit so although you might see a little bit of flex in the footage it's definitely not something that at least i'm noticing when i'm driving other people may feel differently about it but yeah i certainly don't feel like there's enough flex there for it to be a problem for anybody let's just say now in terms of rigidity one other thing we need to mention here is that we have switched over to that other shifted position as we were talking about before so we don't have that extra reinforcement in the wheel deck again not noticing any flex in the wheelbase at all when i'm driving uh you can see a little bit of twist as we demonstrated before just if we pull on the wheel deck up and down you know just looking from here and obviously not from the wheel because there is a little bit of flex in a quick release system with the phantek wheels but yeah the wheel deck itself tiny little bit of twist there but otherwise i would say on par in terms of rigidity with the sim labs p1x at least in terms of the wheel deck and look didn't notice any side to side flex or movement there either but i'm very happy with the es1 seat as well it's very solid you can see a tiny little bit of flex there if i really slam my back into it but that's the same as what you'd have in a real-life race car anyway uh certainly nothing that i would say is excessive whatsoever so absolutely fine there too the way it mounts to the cockpit no problems there at all we haven't had any issues at all with anything working its way loose or becoming problematic while we were driving either which is a good sign obviously we are going to be using this cockpit more extensively over the coming months so we'll let you know if we do run into any issues in the comments or in other videos if need be the only area where there is a little bit of flex is just this this handbrake and shifter mount there's a little bit of side to side movement there what you're seeing there on camera is primarily the movement in the actual shifter itself but if we wiggle it from the base there is a little tiny bit of side to side movement there again i don't think it's enough that it's going to be a problem for anybody but it's the one area where i did notice a little bit of flex where i was driving whereas everything else felt absolutely solid now one observation that we do have with the gt style seating position is there is a bit of a limitation in terms of how much scope of adjustment you have with the position of your wheel physically in relation to the seat and the pedals now because we've got these angled wheel deck uprights which of course do make it easier to get in and out of the rig that is naturally going to push our wheel a little bit closer to us in relation to where it sits along the base rails so although i was able to get this into a comfortable position for me at six foot tall if you were any taller than maybe about six foot four or something like that you may end up having some problems because we don't have any more scope really to move this any further forward than it is now maybe another inch or two at most and we're also within a couple of centimeters of being completely maxed out with how far back we can push the seat on the rig too so potentially maybe longer side rails on the rig may be in order again for me i'm six foot tall it's not a problem for me but it's very close to being a problem for me so any shorter than me i don't think it's going to be a problem for you unless you happen to have really disproportionately long arms or something like that but if you are over six foot tall then you may run into some limitations so the next thing we're going to have a look at now is converting between gt and formula style seating positions now there are a couple little things here what we'll do is we'll roll a time lapse of us actually changing between the two we'll let you know exactly how long it takes to do so as well but what i want to highlight here is that the experience will depend on your body shape as well so the key here is going to be getting these wheel deck uprights into a comfortable position for both formula and gt style driving and then adjusting everything else around that the moment you start needing to adjust these that just ends up making everything else take a lot longer so what we're going to attempt to do here is keep these uprights in exactly the same position then adjust the angle of the steering wheel from here as well as obviously our pedal plate and our seat and hopefully it'll be nice and straightforward so let's give it a go so we've done the most basic adjustments necessary to switch between the two seating positions i just wanted to pause here and run you through a couple of things before we finish off with the final few touches necessary so in terms of adjustment points we didn't actually have to adjust too many things to get to this point we dropped the seat down a couple from the back here so we didn't have to touch anything on the front we just went from this position down to this position did the same thing on the other side as well just be aware on the other side you are going to run into problems this is already in its maximum forward position in terms of where it mounts using all three holes along so we've got one here one here and one here now obviously in a formula style seating position you're not going to have a shifter or anything mounted here but for ease of switching between the two different positions we did just leave this here just to see whether it was going to cause us a problem we were able to get it into the position that i would use just but if you want to drop it down one more lower still you are going to have to remove this armor at least remove one of the bolts to be able to slide it forward a little bit more to suit what you want to do so just be mindful of that we didn't end up having to slide the seat further back or further forward for my seating position remembering i'm about six foot tall but if you are you know a different body shape to me if you've got shorter arms for example you may need to slide the seat forward as well which would mean you'd be releasing these two on this side the opposing two as well and sliding the seat forward not a major issue there most of the complexity is around adjusting the pedal plate in terms of the wheelbase all we had to do was just loosen these two bolts one on either side and just tilt it down a little bit that was very simple only took a couple of seconds everything else is around the pedal plate so we have to switch these arms from being in front to in the back we also did have to slide the pedal plate further back along these rails and move the t-nuts from the forward position to the middle position so that all took a little bit of time wasn't too difficult to do you can do it on your own i intentionally did it on my own just to show that it can be done but it certainly isn't the easiest thing in the world to do i can't really see any way off the top of my head to make it any easier than it is i do think that they've done a good job but it's certainly at least for me not something that i'd be going oh i'm going to drive a formula car and just swap it and then oh i feel like driving a gt car again i'm just going to swap it now the one thing that we haven't done yet is you can see these pedals are tilted quite far towards me now obviously that's going to depend on the types of pedals that you have if you do have an easy tilt adjustment on the pedals themselves then you may not need to make the adjustment here which is the reason why i paused here so the only thing we're going to need to do to fix this problem is to just undo the two bolts on this side the opposing side as well and just slide this assembly up and that is going to bring the pedals back to be square with my feet it took 12 minutes for me to do this the very first time on my own i can't see this being done in anything less than about five minutes uh what you've seen me do here is pretty much the bare minimum that you would need to do for any body shape or any body type obviously adjusting the angle of the wheel which only took a couple of seconds anyway adjusting the seating position and tilting the pedals up is the bare minimum you're going to have to do to switch between positions so pedals are in their correct position now with a 90 degree angle between the face of the pedal and the floor and yeah for my sitting position here very comfortable my knee is not quite completely straight when i push the brake to its maximum amount of force that i want to use and yeah i mean we could fine tune this a little bit more if i was keeping it in formula style seating position forever and i'll probably will end up doing that but yeah for a quick transition between the two this is absolutely fine we didn't end up having to adjust the seat at all just a simple combination of adjusting the pitch of the wheelbase and adjusting or sliding the pedals forward and back along the tray here with the adjustment that we have available is enough to get that in a comfortable position for me and as i was kind of alluding to before i think regardless of your body shape and body's type unless you were particularly sure to have particularly disproportionately long or short legs or arms you're not going to have too many problems so yeah i'd say all up under 10 minutes you could probably get this transition done without too many dramas now you might notice the steering wheel is a little bit far away from me if you just come in and have a look at the top here we do have some little channels here as well now i'm quite comfortable with the way i have this because i don't want my elbows to be bumping into the side of the seat and having it where i have it is quite nice and comfortable but if you did want to move that wheel closer to you do have adjustment scope here too so all we would have to do is loosen these four bolts and we could slide that whole thing about an inch closer to me than it is now which would probably be just about perfect so yeah i'm pretty happy with the way that went to be honest with you guys i thought it was going to be a lot more painful than it actually ended up being i don't think it's something you're going to want to do you know multiple times a day but if you are you know feeling the itch to play an f1 game or something like that for a couple of days and then switch back to gt it's certainly not too painful to do obviously just keep in mind as well the space that you have this installed and obviously we've got a relatively decent open space here so it is quite easy to work in i think if you had a triple monitor stand that was all sitting around here and quite crammed then that would make this a lot lot harder to do so just keep that in mind as well but one other thing that i do want to do as i promised before is jump up stand on top of that again and do another quick pedal flex so just before we do that let's have a quick look at what it looks like in the real world before we go for a driving test too so when i push on the pedals i am actually noticing a little bit of dip there on the nose of the rig so i'm noticing a little bit of downward flex again certainly not enough that i would notice it when i was driving but again we'll do a driving test in just a moment so i'll comment on it if it is a problem but a little bit more downward flex or a little bit more dip than what we had in the gt style position which is what i expected but i'm just going to hop out of the rig now and we'll stand up on it and have a look at what we have there too so i'm going to come around the back and this is a little bit more precarious than last time simply because i'm a little bit higher than i was last time but there we go all my weight is on the rig and yeah that feels pretty sturdy there's actually a little bit less side to side movement in this position than there was before that's probably just down to the fact that i've got these support bars a little bit higher up than they were before so it's added an extra plane of rigidity i guess you could say between you know between these two points so yeah that is surprisingly solid i would say i i expected there to be a lot more flex than that from side to side you can actually see if you come along and look on top actually just hand me the camera from where i'm standing here when i wobble from side to side you guys might not be able to see that on camera but they're actually getting a little bit of twist across the whole rig now rather than it just being the pedal plate moving independently and of course what i'm doing here is completely unrealistic you're not going to have these kinds of forces when you're driving but that is very very solid i'm really quite impressed with that so let's do a little bit more driving with the former style seating position and wrap things up [Music] so [Music] [Music] so a couple of quick observations on formula seating position you'll notice we did actually end up raising my feet or raising the pedal plate a little bit more from what we had before it didn't make any difference in terms of flex we'll talk about flex in just a moment just a couple of quick notes on seating position for formula you want to make sure that you have your legs slightly elevated a little bit of bend in your knees so that when you're pushing on your break your leg isn't completely locked flat you want to be always pushing from your thigh not from your ankle so you can see that is nice and comfortable even when i push the brake into the maximum threshold that i want to use my leg isn't quite touching the top of the seat that's really important we don't ever want to have our calves resting on the tip of the seat because that cuts off circulation can lead to getting pins and needles dead legs and things like that so you don't want that in terms of the wheel position when i have the wheel rotated like that slight bend in my elbow still so it's not quite locked straight that allows me nice comfortable rotation and yeah when i push back into the seat nice and solid again the seating position the amount of curve that i have on that is nice i could go one step lower still if i wanted to be even more reclined but i feel like where i have it now is pretty comfortable and yeah kind of it may still be a little bit of a hybrid position but i think one of the really good things about this cockpit is just the fact that you do have so much scope of adjustment between the gt and the formula style and we haven't even touched on the fact that you could even drop the wheel down have it even more upright and have it more like a truck or even a tractor simulator if you wanted to there really is a massive amount of range of adjustment in this right so conclusions on the next level racing elite and es1 seat so i think the most important takeaway here is this is a massive step up from the likes of the gt track and obviously you are paying for it it is significantly more expensive than the gt track but for me i i have experience with the old as well as the gt track and when i put a direct drive wheelbase on my gt track i did start to run into issues with flex the pedal plate has quite a lot of flex in it as well if you're running load cell pedals or hydraulic pedals or something like that those cockpits are more suited to more entry to mid-level gear whereas this is a cockpit that you'll have no problem pretty much everything that we threw it right the way up through to high-end hydraulic pedals you know there was a little bit of flex in the pedal plate with those but when you're spending that kind of money on a pedestal you kind of expect to have to do a little bit of reinforcement in bits and pieces at least i do anyway so i wasn't particularly surprised by what i saw there but when we're talking within the realms of the kind of gear that you're expecting to be putting on a cockpit like this so you know high-end load cell pedals using their ultimate mecha cup ones like what we have on here for example and a high-end direct drive wheelbase we tested it with the dd1 dd2 of course the csldd and the midge 25 newton meter motor 2 comes with the vrs direct force pro none of those had any problem whatsoever and you can go back through the footage and see the flex for yourselves there's absolutely minimal flex there both between the pedal plate and the wheel and the wheel deck of course and nothing that i even perceived when i was driving at all so yeah look no no difference there in terms of the driving experience when it comes to flex from what we're used to with our p1x for example and i'd even go as far as to say it actually has a little bit less flex than the track racer tr 160 that we tested a year ago had although they have made some improvements to that product over time as well so wouldn't be too harsh on that in comparison simply because we can only compare what we tested at that point in time but i guess the point i'm trying to make here is that this is at least in terms of the driving experience every bit as good as those cockpits are and obviously it is using thinner profile so if you were to test it to its absolute extremes it's obviously going to have a little bit more flex than what you have in something that uses something thicker but again when you put it in the context of what it's actually intended to be used for this is every bit as rigid enough and that goes for the seat as well i think you know this seat has also exceeded my expectation it is perhaps a little bit less refined than what you might get with a true motorsport seat but again when you consider the price i think it nails everything that it needs to in the context of sim racing nice open design here around the shoulders no problems at all for comfort i think it's gonna you know it's gonna suit a wide range of different body types despite still having a relatively snug fit so i am a big fan of this design i think really the only area where i thought things fell over a little bit was just the seat belt that we tested we were able to get that working by just mounting it a little bit lower on the chassis but yeah when we installed it the way it was intended to be installed in the manual just kind of didn't work for us now i did get in touch with next level racing they sent me some pictures of some of their guys that are bigger than me and they didn't have any problems at all with a seatbelt but if you're the same size as me at about six foot tall about 90 kilograms or smaller then you're probably going to have to get a little bit creative with how you mount the seat belt just to work around that little issue and it might seem like i'm hoping on a little bit about it but the reason why i'm kind of focusing on that so heavily is because it really is the only part throughout the entire review process where we kind of felt like it was a bit of an afterthought something that they kind of just chucked in the box because they could rather than something that they put a lot of thought into whereas every single other thing on the cockpit it's obvious that they've put in a lot of time and effort and resource into really nailing it down really fine-tuning it to give you a good experience right from the moment you open the box to getting up and driving and you know again when we go back to the three things that i like to test when it comes to cockpits rigidity we've already talked about that expandability it's an aluminium profile cockpit so you know it is what it is obviously with the angle that you have on the wheel deck mounts or the uprights it will make mounting some accessories a little bit more tricky and we of course do have some accessories available from next level racing unfortunately we don't have them here to test for you today but they do have a freestanding aluminium profile triple as well as single monitor stand as well as keyboard and mouse trays too and i'm sure they'll be adding some other accessories over time as well maybe some button box mounts and bits and pieces like that so keep an eye on the website for those but yeah look just to i guess focus in on the aspects of the tension to detail and i guess unpack that a little bit more for you guys it starts right from when you open the box in terms of what you get inside the box the way it's presented everything is clear it's obvious where things go there's no confusion there all comes in the one box as well while the box is quite heavy at 58 kilos so definitely not something that you're going to be moving around yourself it does make the process of unboxing a lot more enjoyable and a lot you know easier because you don't have to go rummaging through stuff to figure out what it is then we've got the instruction manual which is extremely well presented right through from the materials that it's printed on nice glossy finish but just the way everything's illustrated here is really really simple and straightforward as i said in the review if you can put together a piece of ikea furniture you're going to have absolutely no issue with this whatsoever and we just didn't come across the frustrations that we've had with other cockpits it was just an enjoyable experience all the way through but the attention to detail just really extends throughout the entire thing so just little things like the fact that all the bracketry just fits together we had no problems with holes not lining up or anything like that we don't have any corner brackets to deal with here as well so everything just bolts in straight from the sides and that doesn't appear to have introduced any sort of flex whatsoever so you know that was something that i was a little bit wary of going into this i thought we might see some compromise there and you know just down to little fine things like the little line markings little etchings that we have on the profile to allow you to align things a little bit more easily when you're putting it together or when you're adjusting things you know the fact that the anodizing on the profile hasn't really scratched at all when we've been moving things around we did get one little tiny gouge on one piece which was just caused by a little burr in the in the powder coating or the steel underneath the powder coating on the pedal plate other than that no scratching at all really other than just maybe the top of some of the bits of channel but definitely nothing to be concerned about there and that was one thing i thought might be a problem i thought that you know once we were moving things around and adjusting things that might kind of fall to pieces and start to look pretty second hand quite quickly but again just hasn't proven to be the case and i guess really the most important thing is the amount of adjustability that we have this cockpit now going into this again i thought that you know it was going to be a trade-off between the rigidity that you have with a fixed cockpit design and something that's adjustable between different seating positions generally speaking as soon as you add adjustability you kind of have to take away a little bit from the rigidity but look as you guys saw throughout the review process that just hasn't really proven to be the case at all we jumped around and stood on the pedal plate exactly like they do in their own marketing videos and you know what we saw was pretty much the same as what they display in the videos there's no troubling flex there whatsoever there's a little bit of side to side movement maybe but certainly nothing that you notice when you're driving at least nothing that i noticed when i was driving so yeah that was probably the most surprising thing for me because i really thought that with this design there'd be quite a heavy trade-off and i did expect to see you know at least some flex in the pedal tray and we did see a little bit of flex there when we tested it with those hydraulic pedals as you saw but when you test it with a gear that's kind of intended to be used with something in this price point so high and load cell pedals like the mecha cut ones that we have on here for example absolutely no problem with flex whatsoever it was absolutely fine and that extends through the wheel deck as well no problems at all with a midge 25 newton meter motor dd2 dd1 the csl dd as well tiny tiny little bit of wiggle there but i mean honestly it's about the same as what we've seen on the sim labs p1x and the more recent versions of the track racer ti 160 wheel mounts as well so yeah definitely nothing to be worried about there and definitely nothing that was noticeable in the driving experience and look yeah overall it's just been a really excellent experience so whether or not this is the right cockpit for you i think is ultimately going to boil down to a couple of things whether there's something else that's going to suit your needs that might potentially be cheaper in your area when you factor in shipping now next level racing do have quite a well-established distribution network around the world so do check and make sure that you are getting the best price available in your area if you're looking at this but yeah other than that it really just comes down to whether or not you need the adjustability there are other options on the market that are cheaper that don't have that level of adjustability but look in terms of meeting expectation and doing the things that it says it does absolutely no problems with it whatsoever i think that it's a very very well designed cockpit and something that they've obviously put a lot of passion and time and effort into but ultimately i have absolutely no issues with recommending this cockpit i think they've done a really good job of it and i think the standout thing for me is just really that attention to detail everywhere you look on this with the exception of that seat belt it really is obvious that they put a lot of time and effort into refining this and getting it exactly right before they put it on the market and that is something that i definitely am pleased to see so thumbs up from me guys if you do want to pick one of these up we do have some links down in the description below some of those are affiliate links so they do help out the channel and there is a discount code down there as well if you're purchasing through pacman imports so check that out too and uh yeah guys i really hope that this video has helped you out so thank you very much for watching the video guys if you do have any questions at all make sure you let us know in the comments below i'm happy to answer as many of those as i possibly can and make sure you subscribe to our clips channel as well boosted media clips i'll put a link down in the description below for that as well what we'll be doing is uploading a lot of smaller clips from this longer video there as well to answer some of the more immediate questions like how you mount the wheel how you met the csld how you adjust the pedal plate how you go between different seating positions all those things so if you're wanting to go back in and see those little bits of details either use the chapters below on this video or check out that clips channel link down in the description but that is it for today guys so if you've enjoyed it please do leave a thumbs up let us know if you do have any questions down in the comments below and yeah guys that's it so thank you very much for watching and we'll see you again soon bye [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 39,251

Rating: 4.9029126 out of 5

Keywords: Next Level Racing, F-GT Elite, FGT Elite, Aluminium Profile Cockpit, Formula style cockpit, sim racing rig, sim rig, Simlab, Trak Racer, best sim racing rig, 8020 rig, 8020 sim rig, fanatec, DD1, DD2, CSL DD, Simucube, VRS, sim racing, boosted media, FGT Elite Review, F-GT Elite Review

Id: _-q7V4uwRUM

Length: 85min 4sec (5104 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Phaster]

I was waiting for your review to decide between this and the p1x

[u/tomtobblestop]

Can a GTTrack seat be repurposed to mount on this?

[u/piercejay]

Gonna have to watch this soon, I JUST got the old FGT cockpit so I hope this one’s not too much better lol

[u/YeezyAviator]

I wonder if those pedal mounting bars are the same as the F-GT Lite. I can't mount my Simforge pedals on it, because the slot width is too small.

I also feel like there should be 3 bars or just a large plate of some sort.

[u/inmeucu]

How does this compare to the TR-80 and TR-160? I planned on getting the Sparco formula bucket seat. Would likely sit at either formula or hybrid.