The reason Fanatec hasn’t bothered making the Clubsport V4 pedals yet is because Simagic has already beat them to it, with the P1000 pedals. This is a really nice throttle, brake and clutch set with the option to add powerful, integrated haptic motors that bring things alive, all in a package that really impressed me and satisfied my expectations. Simagic is enjoying a wave of positive sentiment right now and amidst this comes my very first contact with the brand - I totally get it. Let me show you what I liked about them, anything I didn’t, and what you might need to know in advance if you’re looking to get these. On we go.
Affiliate
Before we begin, this pedal set was provided to me by Simagic for review on my request, delivered to me by UK distributors Race Anywhere. You can find places to buy listed below, all of which are affiliate links that will grant me a commission from the sale at no added cost to you whatsoever, supporting my work.
Links To Buy
UK: Race Anywhere
EU: G-Performance
North America: Apex Sim Racing
Summary
First up a real quick summary of the main talking points.
The pedals perform very well in terms of driving accuracy and consistency with no glaring weaknesses, they feel nicely done and I really enjoy driving with them.
The haptic reactors are well worth the price, especially if you have no haptics on your cockpit, they are an excellent introduction to the world of rumble motors.
Adjustability is great, especially the brake pedal with the help of the optional bushing and spring kit, it’s too cheap and too good to leave out, definitely get it.
The price of the full P1000 and haptics set is pretty much the same as Heusinkveld Sprints and VRS Direct Force Pros, but for most people the P1000s will bring more overall enjoyment for the same money due to the fun factor of the haptic effects.
If you like the look of the P1000’s, I feel no hesitation in giving them my seal of approval, there’s very little wrong with them and plenty that’s right.
Kit Contents
What you see above is the P1000 3-pedal set at £418 before tax, £502 including UK VAT. Add in the 3 Haptic Pedal Reactors and a Power Supply, that’s £153 before tax, £183 including UK VAT. Also along for the ride is the Optional Rubber Pads and Springs kit, that’s £14 before tax, £17 including UK VAT.
The grand total of all of this is approximately £585 before Tax, so about £702 including UK VAT and then a touch under £10 shipping from race anywhere to me in the UK, so call it about £710 all in. There are even more accessories and add-ons not included here that take it further still, but for now I have what I consider to be the standard P1000 serving suggestion.
To put that price into perspective, for pretty much the same money you can buy the legendary Heusinkveld Sprint 3 pedal set. You could also buy the reputedly excellent VRS Direct Force Pro 3 pedal set. It may be true that neither of those pedals have onboard haptic motors, but buying this P1000 bundle instead of those is like betting on the boxer going up against Tyson Fury because his shorts are a bit newer and shinier. These optional extras had better be pretty good to justify standing in the same ring.
Unboxing
Unboxing the pedals is a lovely experience - never underestimate the power of opening a box that’s densely packed with sim racing kit. Here, you are definitely made to feel like you’ve bought your money’s worth.
The pedals include, amongst other things, a bag of swappable throttle and clutch springs, and a basic pack of brake bushings to modify the feel somewhat. I will tell you now, the optional Rubber Pads and Springs kit that you see below makes customisation far more expansive, I strongly advise getting it.
Some assembly is required to attach the heel plate to the main pedal body, and to attach the haptic reactors to the back side of the pedal arms and route the power cables as neatly as I could. It took me about an hour of actual work from unboxing to mounted on the cockpit. It is pretty encouraging to see the dedicated haptic power sockets integrated into the baseplate, clearly Simagic is very proud of these little rumble motors and I am excited to see what they can do.
Adjustability is clearly a very big consideration here. It seems that Simagic are the sort to encourage and expect us to tweak and twiddle things to our own tastes and you can certainly do that. You can change the position and angle of the footplates, the travel of each pedal is adjustable via end stops, you can change the spring resistance of the throttle and clutch pedal, and of course the braking pedal feel can be widely modified with the extensive set of bushings and springs in the optional kit. With this kit, you can legitimately modify this brake pedal to feel really solid and direct like a hardcore racing machine, or soft and squishy like a road car, and the best part is that it doesn’t take long to do this at all, a couple of minutes.
The pedals can also be spaced closer or further apart by unscrewing them from the baseplate and fastening them back down in one of the alternate slots but be warned, I moved the throttle and clutch before mounting, only to find that doing so covers the access holes for the bolts that I’d need to tighten to mount them to the cockpit, this seems a bit of an oversight.
I’m sure I’m probably missing some adjustability features but you get the idea: Adjustability of the P1000’s is on the higher end. You can tweak and adjust these pedals to your heart’s content, they rank very highly in this regard. Adjustability is essential for making sure everyone that buys your equipment will find it to their tastes, so credit to Simagic for going all out here.
Software Setup
It’s time to bring these things online, and for that you can use Simagic’s Sim Pro software to calibrate and adjust the pedal curves and forces, and here you can also change the settings for the haptic pedal motors. You can, but you shouldn’t. I was pretty underwhelmed with the capabilities of the haptic reactors when I first gave them a try. Simpro, at least at the time of this review, is pretty limited in what it can command the haptic reactors to react to - just ABS, TC and Clutch bite point. I found myself thinking: ‘This can’t be it. I’ve heard such good things about these haptic motors. There must be something I’m missing.’
Well, there was - the haptic motors true love is Sim Hub. Sim Hub is an incredible piece of software but, to keep a long story short, by using Sim Hub instead of Sim Pro to control these haptics you can do far more with them and really invigorate things. I’ll go into that in a bit more detail shortly, but for now never mind the haptics - are the pedals themselves actually any good to use?
Pedal Performance
Yes, absolutely they are. I find them to be really nice to use and found my feet really quickly, if you’ll pardon the pun.
I found the throttle pedal to be really smooth and consistent, easy to feed in with a great temperament to it. It’s very good for modulating the power and I have absolutely zero reason to find fault, it’s been great in everything I’ve thrown at it. I haven’t felt the need to swap or change the throttle spring or the pedal travel, it’s fine out of the box for me, but it’s great to know that I could if I needed to.
The brake is superb, I felt very confident and consistent with it and my pedal traces looked very smooth. You should definitely explore different options with the brake bushings and springs kit because as mentioned, that’s how you can really zero in on the perfect feeling for you, this is the stack I have settled upon using for now, three of the solid travel regulators and the heavy brown spring.
This produces quite a stiff brake which is really similar to how my Asetek pedals felt, and I have come to prefer that flavour of stopping force, very different to how the P1000s arrive as standard which goes to show how widely you can adjust the brake feel. Point being that it doesn’t matter who you are, I am confident that the optional bushing and spring kit virtually guarantees you’ll get the brake just how you like it. I mainly drive iRacing which is very circuit-focused, but if I was to dip into something else like Dirt Rally or BeamNG then I’d have no trouble swapping over to a softer brake stack to ease the brake pedal resistance, it’s easy.
The clutch is excellent, too, with really nice two stage spring resistance that does a great job of mimicking a real car, though I swapped the standard spring for a heavier red one which is a lot more convincing but the end result is a lovely, legitimately mature clutch pedal which is perfect for manual gearbox motoring and for standing starts off the line.
The pedals are also quiet in operation with very little crashing on the endstops at either end of pedal travel, this is really important to me because such knocking and clacking spoils the pedal feel by transmitting shocks through the soles of your feet and makes them feel cheap and nasty, no such issues here for me, things feel civilised and well made by my books.
Racing with these, I took to them like a duck to water. I haven’t tried every pedal set under the sun but I’ve tried enough to detect when I’m having to modify or compromise myself to accommodate quirks or design choices imposed on me, and I simply don’t feel that way with these. I feel like I can slip into these pedals like an old shoe, I really like them. Based on my experience during testing, I’d be happy for these to be someone else’s experience, and again it all comes down to how accommodating these pedals can be to wildly varying tastes and circumstances. Some pedal sets have an element of hostile architecture - Asetek pedals for example are great to use, but quite uncompromising with limited adjustability, whereas the P1000 are great to use and are the Yes man of the pedal world, however you like your pedals, they’ll allow it.
HPR Haptics
So with my blessing of the P1000’s pedal performance established, let’s go back to the Haptic Pedal Reactors, because they’re pretty important. These are very popular, not just with the Simagic crowd but for racers using other brands, too, with many creating custom adapters and mounts to stick them to their own pedals and join in.
That comparison I drew in the intro about the P1000s being an evolution of Fanatec’s Clubsport pedals starts to make sense here, because although Fanatec were dabbling in pedal haptics years ago with the Clubsport V3 pedals, they didn’t go far enough with them. Their motors were too small and their application was limited - they were really onto something if they’d taken another step forward with them, because Simagic has now adopted that concept and committed far more heavily to it.
So what do these things do, what difference do they make to your sim racing and are they worth the price?
Haptics simply means feedback that you feel, and by attaching haptic motors to your pedals the idea is to introduce sensations and vibrations under your feet which can add an extra dimension to your sim racing experience. In other words, make driving more fun and engaging. Haptics almost always make your experience better and let me tell you, this absolutely applies to sim racing.
With these haptic motors, you can feel jolts whenever you change gears which helps you feel more connected with the power of the engine as you accelerate. You can feel the hits of the suspension and chassis as you rumble over the track surface which adds texture to your driving. You can feel the judders of the front tyres if you lock the brakes or ABS steps in, which alerts you to your overstep. You can feel the chatter of the rear wheels when you light them up leaving the pitbox or out of hairpins, helping you taper your right foot. You can feel the strain and struggle of the tyres as the car leans over through high g-force corners. The motors can be controlled individually and assigned different tasks, so you might assign brake locking and ABS feedback to the brake mounted HPR, whilst rear wheel traction loss might be assigned to the throttle mounted HPR, just to name a few. These help to target the vibration effects on the feet that are most concerned with that particular consequence.
There’s so much you can choose to feel through Sim Hub’s many options, and it will take some tinkering to find what you like best, but whatever ingredients you decide to throw in the pot the end product is that your static sim racing cockpit feels much more alive. It’s easier to be absorbed into the idea that your virtual racing car might be a little bit more real.
I’m a big fan of haptics ever since I started using a Buttkicker on my rig. It’s something I can’t bear to race without, it makes sim racing so much more fun and absorbing.
The Simagic HPR’s, even 3 of them, cannot match the capabilities of a buttkicker, but they’re also nowhere near the price, they’re not expected to compete.
The full triple HPR set is £184, half the cost of my buttkicker which was £360. They’re sadly no good for transmitting engine RPM vibrations, for example, because their frequency range only goes up to 50hz which isn’t enough to cover the wide range that engine revs require, whereas buttkickers can reach as high as 200hz and have a lot more power. To give the HPRs the stage to themselves, I switched off the buttkicker throughout testing and I definitely did miss the powerful engine vibrations.
However, I say that through the lens of someone who already knows and loves haptics - for many people, the HPRs might be their first step into haptics and rumble motors because they’re not tremendously expensive. I can confidently say that if you’re currently hapticless, and this is your first step into it, that’s a one-way ticket, you’re not going back once you’ve tried it. This is why the HPR’s have made such a splash, because they add so much to your overall enjoyment and experience for relatively little money.
Although there are 3 HPRs on the pedals you see here, they are in fact sold individually. It costs £81 to have 1 HPR, £133 to have 2 HPRs and £184 to have the full spread of 3 HPRs.
I tried running 1 HPR at a time, on each pedal, to see if just one could still offer a good experience, and the truth is that no, their effects are really focused and felt on the pedal they’re mounted to, the vibration isn’t really conducted across the pedal unit that well and certainly not to the rest of the cockpit, at least not in my case, your mileage may vary, so you really do need one haptic unit per pedal to really feel the effects on each. If you could only get one, I’d recommend it on the brake because that ABS and wheel locking feedback is the most useful of the lot. Then the throttle for the 2nd, and clutch for the 3rd.
In general, though, the fuss over these haptic reactors is deserved, they add a great new vector of feedback with a pretty low cost of entry and are a great introduction to haptics, even just one of these on your brake pedal alone will feel like a bit of a revolution to many, and I expect other manufacturers to jump onto the haptic bandwagon.
Quirks and negatives
So all positive so far, are there any quirks or concerns?
Not really. There are a few things about the P1000s that might make you go ‘huh’ out of interest more than anything.
Such as the way the throttle and brake pistons can be wiggled about.
Or the way the brake piston that contains the elastomers and springs openly sits in this cup and ball arrangement with no through rod.
Or the way the brake springs can just chill out inside the piston without anything centering them.
Or the way the throttle piston just chills out and rests on this polka dotted bar.
Ultimately though, my feet don’t care about any of it, I can’t detect any unusual movement, inconsistencies or free play whatsoever, so as far as I’m concerned it works great, and in the end I hold every pedal set I try under the same questioning, do I like it or not.
The one gripe I have is that the base plate design makes mounting a little more hassle than other pedal sets, but really it’s just a nitpick, I’m only moaning about it because I change equipment around all the time, if this was on here for 3 to 4 years then who cares if it took me 15 minutes instead of 5 when I bolted it down. The baseplate also helps conceal things neatly so it’s more a double edged sword than a straight up negative.
Conclusion
I can conclude this review with the following character assessment of the P1000’s and I hope current owners agree with it, I’d love to know if you do.
The likes of Heusinkveld and VRS Direct Force pedals are aimed at eSports professionals and the sim racing elite where every hundredth of lap time matters, their reputation for excellent performance is rock solid. But, the vast majority of the general sim racing public would prefer the P1000s because with the haptics they bring something to the table that you don’t have to be a top flight expert to know you’re getting the value from it. I don’t have the means right now to prove if there even is a performance difference between the P1000s and the Heusinkveld or VRS equivalent for me, but I’ve done this enough to have a good sense if my accuracy is being undermined and it’s not, these pedals do feel and perform great and the haptics are a compliment to them, not a smokescreen.
If you’re coming from a set of pedals such as the Fanatec CSL Elite V2s, Moza SRP’s or even Fanatec Clubsport V3’s, you will be very satisfied with the upgrade you’ve made, I’m confident of that.
This is a crowd pleasing, chameleonic pedal set that works great and can flex to fit almost anyone’s tastes, making it a pretty safe bet for me to recommend. I’m happy to say that my first contact with a Simagic product has been a good one.
So that’s it, let me know any questions or thoughts you might have, and I’ll do my best to respond. Thanks again to Simagic for sending the unit for review and to Race Anywhere for handling it logistically.
Links To Buy
UK: Race Anywhere
EU: G-Performance
North America: Apex Sim Racing