Buy From GT Omega - UK, 5% Off Code DANNYLEE (Doesn't apply to Moza products)
Buy From Moza Racing - Global
I am currently using the Moza Racing R9 Wheelbase, SRP Pedals and CS Wheel bundle. I’ve bought these with my own cash, they were not sent by Moza for review. Why is that important to state right off the bat? Well, because it represents a turning point in my mind for Moza Racing becoming a legitimate alternative to Fanatec and the CSL DD which seem to be forever in low supply. Do you wait for a restock that could take as long as a piece of string, or do you give newcomers like Moza Racing a second glance?
I’ve been watching Moza’s progress and I’ve been waiting for the point at which they look like an option I would seriously consider if I was shopping for my first proper sim racing wheelbase today. I feel that day has come, and it’s time to put my money where my mouth is.
I haven’t touched any Moza kit or software up to this point - this bundle is my introduction to them. I bought all items from a regional dealer so my experience should be representative of what any of you watching would get.
The mission is clear: all Moza Racing has to do with their R9 tier is get you close to the Fanatec CSL DD, which I have used for around a year and can compare it to. Achieve at least that, and they will earn their place. Let’s see if it’s the real deal.
One last thing before we get to it, I’ve provided links in the description for places to buy the kit featured in this article and the video at the top of this page. Please check them out once you’re done here to help support my efforts and thanks to everyone who’s done so in the past, it’s much appreciated. I have sole control over my videos and the words within em, and I can tell you exactly what I think.
I’ll round up my main points first, then we’ll dig right in.
It’s good. I really like it overall and in some areas I’m very impressed.
It’s PC only, not console compatible, not yet anyway.
The force feedback is great, absolutely on a level with CSL DD and easy to tune, but it’s vital you explore the settings. Try my Moza R9 settings
The wheelbase runs cool and quiet.
The quick release is rock solid and rapid, top marks there.
The SRP Pedals are surprisingly good, I find them really easy to race with, very good for the price.
The software is also better than expected, intuitive and full of features.
I didn’t encounter any issues getting it up and running with the games I use.
How Moza Racing Stumbled Walking Onto The Stage
First impressions are so important. When Moza Racing came on the scene in late 2021, their approach was to get their first wave products, the R16/R21 Wheelbase, CRP Pedals and RS Wheel into the hands of lots of youtubers and reviewers before anyone had really even heard of them. This somewhat risky strategy is equivalent to appearing on Great British Bake Off before anyone’s had a chance to taste your cupcakes - you’d better be justifiably confident in your product.
Well, for nebulous reasons the reception was pretty mild, because it wasn’t really anything special - whilst not bad, it wasn’t perfectly polished either and as a bystander I was left with the impression that they needed more time and more work, and so dismissed them into the 'not a serious option yet' pile.
Some of you might remember that initial release and agree with that assessment, and I think that although the Moza Racing name is now well known, it’s not yet well established, they’ve got some residual skepticism to shake off and reputation to build. This isn’t a general observation either, this is my viewpoint, it’s the reason I haven’t bothered looking into them until now.
I’m a customer first and foremost and I need to be won over if I’m going to pick them over something else.
The R9 seems to be their hopeful redeemer, a second chance at a first impression now they've have time to refine the offering - it looks good and it’s well priced, and has a cheap wheel and pedals to go hand in hand with it. If anything’s going to turn that fairly mild debut around, it’s gonna be this.
Presentation and Packaging
First up is the packaging - it’s not essential to have smart looking boxes, but it would be off-putting if they were bad. If you've just spent hundreds, perhaps even over a thousand pounds/dollars, the box is the first thing you'll see. These look nice, clean and modern - I don't know what else I expected, but I am more than satisfied that the packaging indicates to you that the product is 'complete' from Moza Racing's standpoint.
CS Steering Wheel Overview
First out of the box is the CS Steering wheel. This is one product but it’s actually made of 3 components - the quick release hub, the button plate, and then the wheel rim itself, all bolted together like a steering wheel sandwich.
The buttons feel nice, dials feel good and crisp, the shift paddles are made of forged effect carbon, too. As standard, the paddles are quite loud, at least to me, but there are silencing pads included which I didn’t discover until a few days in, I just didn’t expect them to be there, it’s like they knew that some people would want to reduce the volume.
The difference in paddle noise and feel with those silencing pads is massive, and while I was installing them I added the included shifter spacers to bring the paddles forward and in a bit, too. This made the shifter paddles feel so much better, because I like very short throw, silent gear clicks. I like that even at this price, with a proper quick release, button module with rev lights and full size wheel rim for around 200 quid, adjustability isn’t being overlooked to cut corners and that’s a good omen. They chuck in a sticker sheet, too, so you can customise the labels for the buttons to a limited degree.
The CS wheel is on the heavier side and most of that is in the rim. Weight is not something you want in a wheel rim if you can help it. The R9 should be powerful enough to cope, but with force feedback wheelbases, a heavy wheel reduces your force feedback range because it mechanically dampens more subtle, granular movements that a lighter wheel would reveal to you. This could be a design choice, but I’d wager it’s a cost reduction choice. We’ll have to see what effect this has.
The quick release is perfect, all metal and reassuringly full of balls. The noise it makes as it slaps home is very, very satisfying and just pushes home, hands free. This precise mechanism is used in various manufacturer’s kit, it’s well proven.
One thing I’m interested in is the 6 screws on the front, which suggests to me that I can swap the round rim out for my usual Turn racing rim at some point, as I much prefer open-top steering wheels to round wheels. I’ll be checking that out later.
R9 Wheelbase Overview
The R9 wheelbase is next and it’s a very important cube indeed. It has an almost vacuum packed appearance with a very tight shell and that chunky wheel shaft. The quick release receiver is also all metal, the contact strips on the nose line up with the pins within the CS wheel to power it meaning the moving parts are wire-free from the outside.
There’s not a lot to interact with on the wheelbase itself so I won’t linger, it is what it is, but it feels densely packed and tightly assembled. The proof will be in the pudding when it’s driven.
There’s 4 screw holes on the underside which lined up with the wheel deck holes on my GT Omega Prime without any trouble, but if you have a thick wheel deck like this then the screws Moza supplies will be too short - you might have to raid the mandraw for screws of the correct length if yours is the same.
SR-P Pedals Overview
The SR-P Pedals are last up and they take clear inspiration from Fanatec CSL pedals, with a modular design that you assemble yourself with options on where you place them horizontally.
I didn’t expect much from the pedals given their price, I assumed they would be pretty basic, just a placeholder, but there are some clues here that I would turn out to be wrong. For one, it’s all metal from top to bottom including the pedal faces, that’s fine, but the backstop on the throttle and clutch are rubber coated which eliminates a fair bit of noise, and the brake pedal stack actually has some travel on it, it’s not rock solid like the CSL pedals are. I don’t want to obsess over the comparison between Moza and Fanatec, but those couple of big criticisms I had with the CSLs, these pedals successfully avoid judging by this. When you’re weighing up one setup vs another, these things do matter.
They look good, the black anodising all round means they’ll keep their head down aesthetically speaking, blending in with any cockpit you might have rather than standing out.
They’re not ideal for freestanding but it’s borderline, you could get away with it if you absolutely had to, but even a basic cockpit will help out so much, so do consider it.
Pedals should never be judged on looks so let’s see how they drive, shortly.
Installation and Software
With all the bits mounted to the cockpit and connected to the PC, it’s time for installation of the software to bring it to life. Moza’s device software is called Pit House and is downloaded from the Moza Racing site, this activates the devices and gives you control over force feedback settings, control settings, features, everything that can be tweaked.
I like to explore by clicking around and just seeing if it’s self-explanatory, and I've gotta say that Pit House is as straight-forward as can be and is easy on the eye. I had no trouble or difficulty following the prompts to connect all my gear and bring it online.
There were a good handful of things in here that I didn’t expect to see, stuff that I saw and thought ‘Cool, I’m gonna be coming back and customising that later’.
With all the kit registering, calibrated and responsive in the software, it’s time to drive and see what we get.
Driving and FFB Tweaking
First thing I did was jump into iRacing, the sim I know best, with a car I know well and driven recently on my Fanatec CSL DD.
My immediate thought was ‘OK, the standard/default force feedback profile is not good'. It was clear what the issue was, it had way too much mechanical friction and damping for what I'm using it for, feeling pretty sluggish and heavy as a result. If you leave the R9 on default settings like this, you will not like what you’re feeling.
This is not exactly a problem - it's only worth mentioning because there’s a bunch of folks out there that won’t ever touch the settings because they're worried they’ll mess something up. With Fanatec kit the default settings out-of-box are pretty good - in the ballpark. Don't take that approach here - explore the settings, try the standard templates, or go off-piste and create your own, or try community settings. Here's a link to mine!
So, time to dig into Pit House and use it for its intended purpose. There are loads of tweakable FFB options with simple, easy to understand labels and tooltips that make playing with force feedback nice and friendly. Nothing is overly technical and things are broadly well explained.
Within about 10 minutes, I had something that felt great and exactly what I was used to, which I hoped would be the case - the stock settings put the fear in me for a second that I would be disappointed but with some quick changes the experience is transformed.
With the force feedback tweaked, the results were far more like what I had hoped for and I spun many a lap to make sure I was happy with everything I was feeling. I could pretty much pick up where I left off with the same car and track combo I was running before I hooked up this Moza kit and it took me no time at all to make my mind up, the sensations and driving feel matches the CSL DD easily, though a tiny bit stronger due to that extra 10% or so of peak torque available, the underlying flavour of the effects is so similar that if I was blindfolded it would be hard to tell the difference.
This is what I hoped for, but for some reason didn’t expect - and I know why. How can a manufacturer come out of the blue and deliver on this? Well, they did. This is the skepticism Moza has to overcome as such a new brand, bit by bit, person by person, and they do that by living up to expectation. So far, so good, but let’s give it something to really chew on.
From the smooth curves of iRacing, to the rocky roads of Dirt Rally 2.
The profile I had fine tuned for iRacing didn’t quite feel right here, so out of curiosity I clicked the ‘Rally’ preset that’s available in Pit House, to see what Moza thinks Rally should feel like. This was better, but I could tell there was more to give. A little experimentation later and I arrived upon the perfect force feedback flavour.
This was a real challenge for the R9 with the heavyweight CS wheel attached, because Dirt Rally is what I would describe as an experience - it lives and dies by how well you can convince yourself that the dirt, gravel and mud beneath your tires is really there.
The R9 does it very well. The wheel bubbles and shudders on gravelly surfaces as the car glides over every rock and stone, with the ever addictive four-wheel slide communicated through your hands, the sudden stress of the dips and feathered flights over crests feeling as good as if not better than the last time I played this. Dirt Rally is so much fun with a direct drive wheelbase but I accept that it can live or die by the settings and force feedback profile. Here's another link to my settings in case you want to give them a try on your R9
The R9’s 9 Newton Metres of strength is over 4 times that of a logitech G923 wheel. It’s over double that of a Thrustmaster T300 wheel, and it’s around 12% more than my prior equipment, a Fanatec CSL DD. What matters more than any of that is the agility of the wheel, the real forté of direct drive wheels.
The R9 seems every bit as agile and nimble as it needs to be, I don’t detect any sluggishness or compromise with this mini direct drive, nor do I detect any perceived graininess or notchiness. I have heard reviewers describe it as notchy or grainy, but if there is any in the R9 I couldn’t describe to you how it feels, it’s all pretty much silky smooth to me. Perhaps this has been ironed out with firmware before I ever laid hands on it, or it could just be me. Admittedly, I’m not one to forensically analyse or technically dissect to the Nth degree - there are so many interesting reviewers that excel at getting down to the nitty-gritty that most of us will never see - I just drive and judge it by how well I can drive with it. From my races, enduros, rallies and tests so far, this thing absolutely does do everything a mini direct drive should.
Heat and Cooling
With that compact size comes some concern about heat. Are you going to be putting your hand on an overly-warm R9 casing after a long session? Well, recently there’s been a record heatwave in the UK, and I spent some of that doing a 3 hour endurance race, of which I drove 2 of those hours, and there was no issue for me. This includes long stints rekindling my love for Dirt Rally in 30 degrees celsius room temperatures. It was torture for me, but not for this, it was tepid to the touch despite a lot of wheel wanging and intense force feedback. If there’s a way to get the R9 sweating, I haven’t found it yet.
LED Settings
The rev strip on the top of the CS wheel is customisable, so you can select which colours you want, the point at which they start to appear and the rate at which they build up, as well as the way in which they appear.
This is a great touch. It’s a standard expected item on more expensive wheels but to see it on a wheel this cheap is great. If you want a single colour, off you go. If you want your rev strip to look like a fruit pastille lolly, go for it. I would prefer a crisper LED style over the diffused style Moza’s gone with here, but I’ll go with it. It flashes too furiously in the pitlane and on the limiter, and when the equipment’s idle it pulses distractingly, but this is software controlled and therefore the options to change this are no doubt in the suggestion box and may be put right in a future software release.
Pedals
Now to talk about those SRP Pedals. I’ll get to the point; I really click with these pedals - I think they’re great and I like them considerably more than the Fanatec CSL Pedals. Whilst I was initially exploring the R9 wheelbase and doing some laps, I suddenly realised that not once did I really think about the pedals, because they’re so neutral and balanced that they didn’t distract from my testing session in any way.
For the price, around £240 if you include the clutch and optional brake accessory kit, I think this is a very good value pedal set. I am pleased by the R9 and CS wheel, but I am impressed with the SR-P. Out of everything that I was looking forward to trying out, the pedals accounted for about 5% of my anticipation and excitement. I assumed they’d just feel like filler but I really am smitten, and I’ll explain why.
First up, the throttle and clutch are nice and quiet courtesy of the rubberised backstops. If you caught my Fanatec CSL pedal video recently, this was a big complaint of mine for them - such a silly thing to overlook but no problem here, they’ve thought of that.
Under the brake pedal is a 2-stage system that uses a combination of a spring and rubber bushing. When you press the brake, the initial take-up is pure spring, followed by a firmer second stage that engages the bushing and feels more like a typical load cell pedal. A combination of positional sensor and load cell figure it all out.
This by itself is not noteworthy, in fact it’s an unusual approach that doesn’t sound like it would work very well, but the results are actually pretty good. It’s the Pit House software that really makes this great.
You can amend the pedal curves of all 3 pedals here, like you can with more expensive pedal units. On the brake pedal specifically, however, you can also tweak how far that first spring stage counts towards braking force - you can set it so that most of the braking is done by the spring stage, or by the load cell. This means that if you want a light brake pedal, you can have it, but if you prefer a more traditional load cell feel, you can have that to a fair extent aswell. You can fine tune this between those two ends of the scale to suit what works best for you.
The downside to this is that the brake pedal has a fairly big initial takeup before it hits that second stage and engages the load cell proper. However, in my book this approach is much more broadly appealing to more people than the rock hard load cell you get on the Fanatec CSLs, which many people end up modifying to soften up, which you won’t have to do here.
SR-P Accessory Kit (Brake Spring and Bushing Set)
The Accessory Kit consists of 2 firmer springs and a firmer bushing. With these, it's possible to create a handful of brake pedal feels and physical compression curves. In short, they allow you to customise and stiffen the brake firmness to varying degrees. I'll get to the point; for about 15 pounds/dollars the kit is essential to include and too cheap to really oppose. I recommend chucking it in with the SR-P's if buying.
I have used the accessory kit to adjust brake feel, and with a switchover time of 30 seconds between configurations (I timed it), it's also very simple to find a setup to settle on.
Profile switching
You should never use your phone whilst driving, unless you’re sitting at your Moza wheel and using your phone to edit and switch between force feedback profiles.
Initially I didn’t fancy using the mobile Moza app and ignored it for a couple of days, just using the Pit House software to switch between profiles by manually saving and loading. Curiosity eventually got the better of me and I tried it out.
The app connects to your Moza kit via the R9's internal Bluetooth receiver and essentially becomes a mobile version of Pit House where you can tweak the settings via your phone, but crucially it provides the option to switch profiles on the go, including saved presets.
This is one answer for the convenience to jump from game to game and switch presets easily, because as mentioned earlier you get the best results when the feedback is tailored for you and the game together. I don’t hop between titles much, but when I do, I just pop the app open now and tap on my saved preset for whatever I’m in.
For someone that initially dismissed the app as a gimmick, I actually find it pretty handy for tweaking and fine tuning in-game.
Custom Rim Mounting
As I also mentioned earlier it looks possible to swap out the CS rim for one of my choosing, and for that I have my trusty Turn Racing R320 rim ready to go. This Turn rim is considerably lighter than the original CS rim, so it should help me discover how the R9 feels with less mass to spin.
As predicted, a lighter, slightly smaller rim means the short, sharp spikes you get when you strike kerbs, drive over uneven surfaces and rumble strips are a bit more pronounced and the experience is a little more intense and agile overall. The mid-corner torque and leaning forces are the same, but the overall agility of the R9 feels heightened.
This is one way in which Moza choosing a heavy rim for the CS wheel results in hiding some of the R9’s best assets, because a heavy rim rounds off all the sharp corners that sometimes you want to feel. Again, this is a universal consideration with force feedback and the same thing can be said on anything but the most powerful direct drive wheelbases. The option to add your own rim to the CS wheel is something that some will definitely appreciate to unleash some of that responsiveness that a lighter wheel would allow.
Customer Support
One area that Moza Racing can only prove with time is customer support, and they’re too new to have an angry mob cursing their name on the internet yet. Moza doesn’t have to jump very high to beat the bar set by Fanatec, however it is typical for new brands like Moza Racing to work hard to avoid bad customer service experiences. That is pure speculation on my part, though, but they won’t get far unless they show willingness. We’ll have to see about that one in time.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I am surprised. I hoped to just be satisfied, I didn’t expect to be impressed.
In comparison to Fanatec, there are several important ways Moza’s definitely done things better, like choosing a good quick release system and the friendly pedal set.
There are some ways in which it’s not as good, obviously no console support is a big one, some visible seams in the user experience when swapping feedback profiles, and the default feedback presets were far off the mark for my tastes, but none of that affected me anywhere near as much as the good bits benefitted me.
All Moza Racing had to do was offer another alternative to the CSL DD for PC sim racers, to provide a solid option for people upgrading from low end wheels or jumping straight into the mid-range. In my mind, this is absolutely it.
Head over to the Youtube video linked at the top of the article and check out the comments or add your own, too. Feel free to ask questions there and subscribe for videos and guides on many more things in Sim Racing.
Buy From GT Omega - UK, 5% Off Code DANNYLEE (Doesn't apply to Moza products)
Buy From Moza Racing - Global
Comments