I’ve tested quite a few racing wheel setups over the years from a variety of manufacturers, but none have impressed me quite like the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race, which bundles everything you need for an immersive racing experience into one box, and it’s super easy to use yet extremely customisable.
In the box, you get the base station, a high-quality wheel, pedals as well as a modular control unit, all will I’ll talk about in this review. As far as the setup goes, it’s fairly simple but will likely require you to read through instructions, just in terms of assembly of the various parts.
The base station can either grip onto your table or a simulation station. There’s a cute little allen key inside of it that allows you to loosen two screws that will then let you grip it into your desk, which you’ll absolutely want to do as that K-Drive feedback motor has some serious pull. I attached it to my coffee table which sits in front of my Xbox and it was able to tighten really easily an didn’t move at all.
From there, you just want to attach your steering wheel onto the unit, plug your motor into power, attach your control unit with included screws, attach your pedals and then the whole unit to your Xbox or PC. There’s a lot of cords so be prepared to cable manage, but I’m super glad that everything is included in the box and you can have as an immersive experience as possible.
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As I’ve stated in reviews past, I love that Turtle Beach products are super compatible with the Xbox Series X|S with there being an app that lets you upgrade the firmware without needing access to a PC. It’s the case here with the Tuner Companion app letting you not only upgrade firmware, but also letting you customise buttons and steering components until your heart is content. There’s also a Tuner Companion app on iOS and Android too that was super easy to connect and let me customise everything as well, so that was a nice option to have.
As far as the actual unit goes, the K-Force motor is absolutely phenomenal. This basically provides real time feedback based on everything happening on screen, so if you’re racing faster, it’ll tighten up making steering harder, and if you go crashing into the wall, you best be ready to hold onto that steering wheel tightly as it will fly around if you don’t. It’s an immersive experience unlike I’ve ever had with a racing wheel in my house and it really elevates it to the next level.
How the VelocityOne wheel takes things further is with its overhead display. This basically allows you to see how far you’re pushing all the pedals, but it’s great for customisation on the fly without the Xbox app as well, where you can control what each button does, go between profiles or change the RGB lighting. On PC, you can actually use it to output information in real-time, but to my knowledge this isn’t available on Xbox yet, which is a bit of a shame, but it’s still super useful.
There’s also a modular control unit, with a number of buttons, dials and flick switches that you can assign pretty much anything to including standard Xbox buttons, or changing between profiles or even adjusting how much the force motors are. Again, if you’re someone that is super into simulation racing games, you can make use of it with all the bells and whistles, but if you’re just a casual racer, you can make use of these too.
On the wheel itself, there’s every control that you’d need both for racing, but also just to get around your Xbox dash with all of the face buttons, your D-Pad, and even an Xbox button to utilise. There’s also magnetic paddle shifters on the wheel as well. You can plug a headset directly into the control unit as well, and there’s even dedicated controls for that.
The other part of a package is a pedal set which has fully adjustable throttle, brake and clutch pedals that can be customised to your exact liking, but it’s the brakes in particular that I wanted to highlight with the system featuring a dynamic brake tek load-cel which is measured by force rather than the distance that the pedal travels. As a whole, these feel really good quality and I was actually surprised with how light they are considering the quality.
All-in-all, I absolutely love the VelicityOne Race set both for the fact that you get everything in the package, but also for how easy it is to plug and play and get racing, but then the amount of customisation available on the system itself, on your Xbox/PC or on the companion mobile app. It feels really well thought out and I can’t imagine a better value for money set on the market.
