Our Verdict
Pros
- 180kg load cell allows for a lot of adjustability
- Easy to adjust without tools
- The design is fantastic
- Both brake and throttle performance is excellent
- Alternate elastomers and springs included
Cons
- Cannot change the distance between pedals
- Cannot be individually mounted
- Strange cable management
What are the Asetek pedals?
Sim racing pedals are a strange enigma. They’re never the hero of a sim rig, always mounted at the lower rear of a sim rig, and rarely on show. And despite cool-looking racing wheels and branded wheel rims often stealing the show, the sim racing pedals are often the one piece of hardware that can actually help you become faster.
Upgrading to a good set of load cell or hydraulic sim racing pedals can be like night and day compared to budget sets. In this review, I’ll be looking at one of the more impressive sets of load cell sim racing pedals, the Asetek Forte throttle and brake pedal set.
But before I delve into the review, I just want to disclose that Asetek sent me this set of pedals for review. As with all of our reviews, this does not impact the outcome of this review in any way.
Who are Asetek Sim Sports?
Asetek made a splash into the sim racing world with the launch of their Invicta hydraulic pedals, shortly followed by their partnership with supercar manufacturer Pagani.
Despite a long history in PC liquid cooling, Asetek transitioned into the sim racing space with these exciting new sim racing pedal sets. The Forte pedals were announced a little while after the hydraulic Invicta pedals, and since having them on our rig have quickly become our pedal set of choice.
Price
The Forte pedals don’t use hydraulic technology, instead, they sit in the premium load cell pedal market. Priced at $550 or €460, they are about as premium as you can get for a load cell pedal before stepping up to a hydraulic set.
But, with a load cell pedal that looks to simulate a hydraulic one thanks to its unique brake cylinder, you may not need to spend the extra money on a full hydraulic set.
It is worth noting that this price only gets you the two-pedal set without a clutch. Like many high-end sim racing pedals, the clutch is an optional extra and costs around $300 for the Invicta clutch add-on.
For me, this wasn’t an issue as I spend 99% of my time sim racing in GT or F1 cars. But it’s worth accounting for that extra price if you do want a full three-pedal set.
- Buy the Asetek Forte Pedals – $549.99 / €462.18
The design of the Asetek Forte Pedals
That leads me nicely to the design of this pedal set. I have to say, I’ve not seen a set of sim racing pedals that look quite as good as these Forte pedals do.
Generally, in sim racing, pedals come in two forms. You’ll have your standard three-pedal sets that make up the majority of sim racing pedals. These are your Fanatec, your Thrustmaster, and your MOZA-style pedal sets. They normally feature very safe design choices and are aimed at the budget to mid-range market.
On the flip side, you’ll have hardcore, bare metal sim racing pedals that look like they’ve been ripped right out of a GT3 car just before it goes out on track.
These Asetek pedals don’t fit into either of those categories.
Instead, Asetek has opened up the style playbook, which allows these Forte pedals to stand out from the crowd. The design is very sleek with thin, elongated pedal arms and face plates.
There are RGB LED lights built into the base of the pedal which are fully customisable. You’ll find heavy use of orange accents all over the primarily all-black pedals, and the two-pedal set looks like it’s been on a hardcore diet by just how slim its overall form factor is.
You can tell just from looking at these sim racing pedals how much they stand out from the crowd. And that, for me, is a very good thing. These Forte pedals are making sim racing pedals cool and sexy, not something that should be hidden away at the back of your sim rig.
Asetek Forte Pedals Build Quality
Almost all areas of these Forte pedals are constructed from aluminium powder coated in a soft black colour. This adds a lot of rigidity to the pedals, which is certainly needed.
The only pieces of plastic on this whole pedal set are on the underside of the pedal plate and towards the rear of the throttle, which houses some electronics. The rest is completely constructed from metal.
This results in very little flex between components. Neither pedal really moves or flexes from side to side, and the pedal arms are as completely solid as you’d like to expect.
One small niggle with the overall build quality is there are a couple of cables on show. There is a small cable that pops out of the rear of the brake cylinder, which I’m not sure why Asetek didn’t route through the underside.
Then there is the USB cable that connects the pedals to your PC or wheel base. This is located at a strange angle coming out of the throttle towards your feet.
This is situated behind the pedal arms so you’ll never make contact with it, but it does look a little messy. Many other pedal sets have this cable coming out of the side or rear of the base which does look somewhat tidier.
Mounting and adjustments
One area where these Forte pedals really shine is when it comes to making adjustments. Now, you may not need to adjust your brakes all that often. Ultimately, you’ll want a consistent brake pedal. But you will almost certainly want to make some adjustments the first time you mount these to your rig.
You can make just about any adjustment you need without any tools. There are screws and thumb nuts all over the pedals that allow you to easily make adjustments to the pedal angle, the travel, the stop position and the stiffness.
Adjusting these pedals was by far the easiest adjustment I’ve ever made to pedals. Other branded pedals often require you to bring a set of tools to make these adjustments, and may require you to partially take apart the pedals or unmount them to make similar adjustments.
Adjusting the resistance with springs
It’s also worth noting that the pedals include a set of different-strength elastomers, allowing you to change the resistance of the brake pedal. Changing these makes the brake pedal feel softer or firmer.
I’ve gone slap-bang in the middle with the yellow elastomer from the additional elastomer kit, which is on the softer side. That is because I’ve come from lower-powered pedal sets in the past, so I am used to a brake pedal that isn’t rock solid.
Adjustments can also be made in the RaceHub software, where you can change the input curve and maximum pressure of your pedals. It’s just as easy to calibrate these pedals in RaceHub, change your deadzone for each pedal, and customise your own pedal maps.
You can see that there are a large number of ways to adjust these pedals to fit your preferences.
Mounting the Forte pedals
Mounting them is just as easy. Four pre-drilled holes allow you to mount them from the top down using M6 nuts.
If you’re mounting them to a sim rig, and I’d highly recommend you do, these four holes should line up nicely with your pedal plate. They certainly did on my Trak Racer TR8 Pro, and I had very little issue lining them up.
One thing to note is that you cannot adjust the distance between the brake and throttle as you can with many sim racing pedals. And as far as I’m aware, you can’t remove them from the base plate and mount them individually.
This didn’t affect me as I found the spacing between the two pedals about spot on, but for some, this may be an issue so it’s worth considering. If this is an issue, you can pay ever so slightly more for the S-Series Forte pedals, which are essentially exactly the same pedals but are individually mounted to give you more adjustment.
Performance
Now I want to look at the performance side of this review, as this is what makes or breaks a good pedal set. And I must say, the overall performance I get from these pedals is incredible.
There was certainly an adjustment period when swapping to these pedals, which I’ll touch on in a minute, but after I acclimatised myself to the Forte pedals, I really enjoyed them. And they are still on my rig as my pedal set of choice which says everything you need to know.
The brake
The first thing I noticed when jumping into ACC with these pedals was the stiffness of the brake pedal. This was the first area where I had to adjust my driving style slightly.
Out of the box, the brake pedal moves very little. All of the in-game brake input is dictated by pressure rather than travel.
As I mentioned earlier, these pedals include a set of different brake elastomers that adjust the overall stiffness and travel. You can also buy a set of additional elastomers.
The default elastomers that come with the Forte pedals include a dark green elastomer right about in the middle of firm and soft. Then, there is a white elastomer included, which allows the brake pedal to feel softer and closer to what you’d feel in a regular road car.
If your favourite workout day is leg day, a stiffer yellow elastomer is included, increasing the brake stiffness. This is ideal for those who like to feel like they are pushing against a brick wall when braking.
This pressure took a little while to get used to, but after half an hour or so of hot lapping, I was able to brake incredibly consistently.
How strong is the load cell in the Asetek Forte brake?
It’s worth noting that the load cell in the brake pedal is rated up to 180kg of force. Using the medium-strength elastomer, I used a maximum of about 60kg of force each time I pressed the brake pedal. This can be further adjusted in RaceHub while calibrating.
The brake pressure goes hand in hand with the brake pedal travel, which is very short.
You can make some adjustments to the preload, which elongates the pedal distance. However, increasing this felt slightly unnatural to me, as it created an almost deadzone before any real pressure was applied. This is designed to simulate the gap between the brake pad and the disc, but I felt leaving it pretty close felt the best.
The throttle
While the brake pedal uses a load cell, the throttle pedal uses a contactless Hall effect sensor that measures the throttle’s overall position to dictate your input.
Much like the brake pedal, the throttle has a huge amount of adjustment available. The front thumb nut allows you to adjust the pedal angle, and the nut at the rear of the pedal allows you to adjust the pedal’s travel.
There are two nuts located behind the throttle that allow you to adjust the spring preload. This adjustment lets you stiffen or loosen the spring, affecting how much force is required to push the throttle pedal.
The out-of-the-box setting was spot on. I didn’t really adjust the angle of the pedal, as it felt good once I’d mounted it correctly. More on that in a second.
The stiffness of the throttle pedal felt pretty spot on right away. I played with the adjustments a little just to see if I could fine-tune it to feel any better, but it turns out the standard setting was about right for me.
Adjusting the throttle
There is an additional spring included, which is stiffer than the good default spring, as the only thing I might change moving forward is to stiffen the pedal up slightly with that additional spring.
One thing that took me a little while to get used to, and caused me to play about with my mounting was the angle of these pedals. With other pedal sets, I’m used to mounting them at an angle so they felt comfortable.
I found that these Asetek pedals were much comfier when mounted flat to my sim rig with zero angle. This is down to the very vertical angle of both pedals, and took a little bit of getting used to.
Of course, you can adjust the pedal arm angle, but mounting them horizontally was good enough for me to feel comfortable while racing.
Compatibility
These pedals are only compatible with PCs and aren’t console-compatible. However, they can be used independently of any other Asetek products. They come with both a USB-C and USB-A cable, allowing you to connect them to your PC directly or to your wheel base if you’re running an all-Asetek setup.
Should you buy the Asetek Forte Pedals?
So, would I recommend these Asetek Forte pedals? As you can tell, I think they’re fantastic, and the fact that they are still on our rig says everything you need to know.
My one concern over giving these a flat-out recommendation is the price point. Certainly, I think that the performance on offer is worth the cost, and if you have the money to spare, I’d say to buy them without a doubt.
However, nobody should ever really jump into a $550 purchase lightly, and the fact that you only get two pedals for that price may deter some sim racers. Compared to other pedal sets that are out there, you can get good pedal sets for under this price point that do include a third clutch pedal.
However, the saving grace for the Asetek Forte pedals is that none of the sub $500 pedal sets come close to the performance, design and build quality.
Yes, they may be a little pricey for just two pedals, but the performance is outstanding, as is almost every other part of these pedals. For that reason, I can’t help but recommend them and admit that I may be in love with this pedal set.
Technical Specifications
Review written by Felix König
