Key Takeaways
- Enhance the realism of your sim racing experience with bass shakers, triple-monitor setups, and a button box for added immersion.
- Use tools like Crew Chief, racing overlays, and mods to customize your sim racing setup and make the gameplay more interactive and engaging.
- Invest in a quality racing wheel, pedals, shifters, and even a VR headset for the ultimate sim racing experience.
Racing games have come a long way since the early days of Wipeout and Space Race. With an increase in the computational prowess of modern PCs and consoles, it’s possible to enjoy photo-realistic graphics and precise controls in your favorite racing titles. In fact, the racing games industry itself has evolved over time, and has spawned several sub-genres ranging from casual kart-racers to fast-paced arcade titles.
One such sub-genre is sim racing. But unlike its brethren, sim racing is quite hard to get into – both in terms of accessibility and budget. For the uninitiated, racing simulators use real-life physics and precise controls to make you feel as though you're behind the wheel of an actual car. Modern titles like Dirt 2.0, Assetto Corsa, iRacing, and Automobilista are built to provide a realistic driving experience, and there are plenty of methods you can employ to take your sim racing setup to the next level!
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8 Bass shakers
For your chair and racing peripherals
Adding bass shakers to your pedals, shifters, and most importantly, gaming seats is one of the best ways to instantly increase immersion in racing simulators. Capable of providing tactile feedback in response to the car movements, bass shakers are perfect if you want the enhanced realism provided by physical vibrations.
That said, installing bass shakers into your sim racing setup is pretty time-consuming and requires a certain level of finesse. Pedals and shifters aside, mounting the shakers onto a chair can be quite complex, and you might end up damaging your expensive gaming throne if you’re not careful. So, if you’re relatively new to the DIY world, I recommend leaving bass shakers for later and looking into the rest of the customization options instead.
Dayton Audio TT25
7 Triple-monitor setups
With a shoutout to bezel hiders
Source: Razer
Multi-monitor setups are fantastic for productivity, but they can be just as useful for gaming. While a dual-monitor setup obviously won’t work for a Surround/Eyefinity sim racing, the grass is greener on the triple-monitor side. On the software side, you can easily configure all three displays to act as one large screen using your GPU’s control panel. That said, there’s a lot to consider when using such a setup.
You’ll need to set the resolution, refresh rate, and aspect ratio you wish to game on in accordance with your PC’s specs. If you don’t have a top-of-the-line system rocking the most powerful components, it’s a good idea to stick to 1080p or 1440p resolution at 60Hz. Then there’s the whole bezel issue, which can be rather distracting unless your monitors have narrow bezels, or you use an expensive bezel-hiding kit. That said, there's a much better alternative to triple-screen setups, which we'll get to in a bit.
6 Button box
There’s no such thing as having too many buttons
Most driving wheels come with several built-in buttons in addition to triggers and analog sticks. However, some of the more detailed sim racing titles tend to have dedicated options for practically every car-related action you can perform in-game, be it navigating the UI, controlling the headlights and mirrors, or switching traction control, ABS, and other driving assists. That's where a button box comes in handy with its rich set of knobs, toggles, and buttons.
Fortunately, you don’t need to spend an exorbitant sum on a dedicated button box. If you’re on the DIY side of things, you can easily build a button box out of an Arduino board. Likewise, most Stream Decks can be repurposed as button boxes for your favorite sim racing titles.
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5 Crew Chief
To get scolded by your very own crew
Crew Chief is an amazing application that adds chief and spotter voices to your favorite sim racers. Installing this free application is a cakewalk, and while the initial menu may seem rather complex, Crew Chief packs enough customization options to modify the racing crew’s warnings, messages, and even voices. Crew Chief’s integration into sim racers is so smooth that you’d feel as though you’re talking to an actual team.
And yes, talking, because you can connect your microphone to the app and reply to the spotter/chief pair in real-time. As if that’s not enough, Crew Chief has a repository of common names, and you can have the racing crew refer to you by any name (including your very own)!
4 Sim racing overlays and dashboard apps
To customize the UI to your liking
On their own, most of the popular racing simulators have decent dashboards and other UI elements. But if you want maximum immersion, then it’s better to look into a third-party application that can display useful information like rankings, track map, input telemetry, and update them in real-time. Having used my fair share of overlays, I’d give my vote to Racelab if you want an app that’s compatible with multiple sim racing titles.
Dashboard tools are another useful addition to your racing app suite. For the uninitiated, these applications can send your car’s speed, gear, tyre pressure, fuel usage, and other numerical data to a dedicated dashboard unit, monitor, or even a smartphone. SimHub is easily my recommended dashboard application as it not only works with multiple devices, but it’s also compatible with pretty much every sim racing game out there.
3 Mods, mods, and even more mods!
To fine-tune every aspect of your favorite racing simulator
As someone who has sunk hundreds of hours into the original Automobilista and Assetto Corsa, I can safely say that it’s the mods that elevate these titles from great racing sims to absolute masterpieces. For starters, there are car and track mods that add more playability by introducing new vehicles and maps, with some, like the Shutoko Rival Project, bringing real-life locations to the mix.
There are also custom shaders and mods that improve the graphics by adding impressive-looking effects ranging from realistic reflections and cool post-processing filters to full-blown weather conditions and day/night cycles. Then you have quality-of-life mods that add custom playlists, mini-maps, sound packs, and more. And I haven’t even mentioned the more complex tools that let you customize the appearance and tuning of your favorite cars.
2 Racing wheel
Don't forget the pedals and shifters
Controllers are great for arcade racing titles like the Forza Horizon and Burnout series, but you’ll want to invest in a proper driving wheel if you wish to immerse yourself in your favorite sim racing game. Thanks to the rise in the demand for racing games, driving wheels have become more affordable than ever, though there are some aspects you should keep in mind before making your choice.
Wheels with larger angles of rotation allow for more precise controls, and those supporting haptic feedback are a must if you want more immersion. Most racing wheels also come with pedals and shifters. If money isn’t an issue, I recommend grabbing a set that includes multiple pedals and multi-axis shifters for the best experience.
Logitech G923 Racing Wheel
$350 $460 Save $110
$350 at Amazon
1 VR headset
The definitive accessory for sim racing. Period.
Confession time: I’ve always been a fan of sim racing games, even when I had a basic keyboard and mouse setup. Needless to say, when I got my first racing wheel sometime in 2015, I was blown away by how immersive the entire experience suddenly became. But it was nothing compared to the amazement of strapping on my Oculus Meta Quest 2 and being teleported into the interior of a car in Assetto Corsa.
Sure, not every sim racing title supports VR out-of-the-box, and you might need to spend an entire evening configuring the mods to work with your headset. Then there’s the whole performance impact of driving in VR, and you'll need a highly-capable machine with a powerful CPU and a cutting-edge GPU if you want to run racing simulators with multiple AI drivers at playable frame rates. Nevertheless, it’s hard to go back to a flatscreen or even a triple monitor setup once you’ve driven your first lap inside a VR headset. And once you combine VR sim racing with the other tweaks and apps on this list, there's no going back to other games!
Sim racing: An expensive hobby that’s extremely satisfying
Despite my love for sim racing games, I’ll admit that they’re not for everyone. It can take more than a few days to get the hang of realistic physics, especially if you’re used to the casual mechanics of arcade racing titles. Heck, mastering some of the more basic elements like weight balancing and trail braking can take quite a long time.
But if you enjoy the technical aspects of car handling and want to experience the thrill of driving realistic cars on replicas of real-life tracks, you should definitely take the plunge into the sim racing rabbit hole. You won’t regret it (though your wallet definitely will).
