Asetek Forte Formula Steering Wheel Review

What is the Asetek Forte Formula Wheel?

Today, I’m going to examine the impressive-looking Asetek Forte Formula wheel, a sim racing product.

This wheel is a pure formula-style sim racing wheel that you can see has taken a lot of inspiration from real-world wheels. It’s quickly become one of our favourite sim racing wheels that we have in the studio, and in this review, I’m going to tell you why, along with some quirks and things that I’m not so keen on.

But before we dive into the design and performance of this Asetek steering wheel, I wanted to disclose that this steering wheel was sent to me for review by the guys at Asetek. With all reviews, this does not impact the outcome of this review in any way.

Who are Asetek Sim Sports?

So let’s start with a very quick overview of Asetek Sim Sports as a company because, until recently, many sim racers may never have heard of them.

Although Asetek may seem relatively new to the sim racing space, this Danish company has been producing some of the best gaming hardware over the past twenty years. While the Forte wheel is the company’s first sim racing steering wheel, many gamers may have used Asetek products on their PCs without ever knowing it.

Before delving into the world of sim racing, Asetek specialised in producing some of the best-performing liquid cooling systems in the market. Then in 2021, they jumped into sim racing with the launch of a selection of sim racing pedals.

You may have seen the uber cool-looking Pagani Huayra sim racing pedals around. These are Asetek pedals, as are the hardcore Invicta pedals. Both of these pedal sets utilise hydraulic pistons and both are the real deal.

So, as you can imagine, this impressive history had me and our guys in the studio incredibly excited when we got our hands on the Asetek Forte wheel and wheel base.

Price

But you may wonder where this Forte Formula Wheel sits in the sim racing space. Does it occupy the budget space, or is this Forte wheel going to be astronomically expensive like some we’ve seen?

Well, it hovers right around the middle ground. It certainly isn’t cheap, at $650 or just under €550, but it doesn’t require you to sell your dog and remortgage your house to afford it.

This price range is about spot on for this level of sim racing wheel. While I’d always be happy to see this sort of product cheaper, if Asetek did lower the price, then some of the functionality that makes this wheel great would need to be cut.

• Buy the Asetek Forte Formula Wheel – $649.99 / €546.21

The design of the Asetek Forte Formula Wheel

The wheel’s design is slightly unique, with a dip in the middle and raised top corners. I have to say, I wasn’t a fan of this design choice initially.

You can really see the resemblance to the Williams F1 steering wheel, and I understand the choice for this central dip. In theory, it allows you to see a screen if you have one mounted on your wheel base, or you’ll have a less obstructed view of your monitor.

But the problem with this is that where the steering wheel mounts to the wheel base, both the quick release handle and the wheel base itself are the only things you get a better view of.

Unless you mount your wheelbase at a really extreme angle, this central dip won’t increase visibility at all. This leads me to believe that a straighter top-edge design would have looked slightly more appealing to me anyway.

Now, you may think that I’m talking about this dip a little too much and making too big of a deal out of it. But really, the only reason I’m doing this is that there really isn’t too much else about the design of the Forte wheel that I dislike.

Five things I love about the Asetek Forte wheel

Across the rest of the steering wheel, everything is incredibly well-considered and quite frankly, I really like it. Let’s jump into a quick list of five things I love about this wheel.

• First, the diameter is spot on the right size for a formula wheel at 290mm.
• Next, rubber grips on the handles is by far the best choice. It’s much better than Alcantara and leather. Despite not looking quite as nice as both those materials, it feels and performs brilliantly with or without gloves and wears better over time.
• Then there’s the sheer amount of inputs this wheel offers. 12 push buttons, 3 rotary encoders and 6 thumb encoders.
• The thumb encoders are positioned just right. Their placement on the front of the wheel in the top corners is much better than facing your thumbs in the hand grips, which avoids accidental knocks when turning the steering wheel.
• And to round out my top five things I love about the Forte Formula wheel, it has to be the quick release. Oh, that quick release is so silky smooth to use and is by far the best quick release on any sim racing product to date, but more on that later on.

Asetek Forte Wheel features

So now that we’ve had a super quick look at my top five features on this wheel, let’s slow things down and dive deeper into this wheel and everything it offers.

Build quality

I’m going to start by looking at the design, the materials used and the wheel’s overall build quality because this stuff really matters when it comes to investing in a product that is going to withstand a good amount of punishment.

You’ll notice when you first look at the wheel that the front face plate is finished in carbon fibre. This is a 2mm woven carbon, and it adds a really nice reflection and gloss to the front of the wheel.

Around the back, the rest of the body and chassis is constructed from a unique forged carbon injection mould. This looks from a distance to be forged carbon fibre, but you’ll notice when you get up close, it feels much softer. When you touch it, it feels much more like a form of plastic or rubber, and that is due to Asetek using a combination of carbon, glass and plastic composite in the construction.

This injection mould adds a lot of rigidity to the wheel, and you will notice that during use or if you undertake the very technical shake test. You could throw this thing at a wall, and it would bounce right off; it feels that sturdy and strong. However, please don’t do that. I don’t fancy someone in the comments blaming me for a broken steering wheel!

Inputs

Moving on to the inputs on offer here, you have a pretty wide selection.

Push buttons

Scattered across the carbon face plate, you’ll find 12 push buttons, all of which are conveniently located around your thumb grip, with a few slightly further down.

During the heat of a race, I had no issue with any of the positions of these buttons, and I could intuitively move my thumb to push an input without taking either hand off the wheel.

Each button features a blank face with no stickers or predefined labels, which I really like. So many sim racing wheels come with labels such as DRS or P for the pit limiter already printed onto each button. And I don’t like this.

This is designed to encourage sim racers to use the wheel manufacturers’ suggested layout. However, most sim racers have their own preferred layout, which will almost always be different from the suggested label on each button.

I think Asetek’s decision not to include labels on its buttons is a good move. However, a sticker sheet included lets you put stickers on whichever button you like if you need a reference, and this is the perfect way for me to label inputs.

The buttons themselves are relatively stiff to engage, which is good if you’re prone to an accidental button press here and there. You need to apply a fair bit of force to activate any of the buttons on this wheel, but not to the extent that any button input feels cumbersome.

How do the buttons feel?

When you place your thumb on a button, there is a slight bit of movement or wobble, but this is rarely felt while racing so isn’t much of an issue. While feeling firm enough to engage, each button press has an incredibly short throw, which I like.

Next to each button on this wheel is a little LED light to help guide your thumb into position. These lights are bright enough to be seen in your peripheral vision but not bright enough to cause glare in a dark room.

You can run through the RaceHub software and customise the colour of each button to really personalise this wheel. The base orange colour is undoubtedly my favourite, as it works well with the orange accents scattered across it.