If you take the Fanatec Formula wheel and enact a handful of items on my wishlist of things that I would have liked to change about it, you’ll end up with something like the Moza GS wheel. This is the most advanced wheel Moza has brought forward in their limited time in this field so far (though they've recently surpassed this with a screen-laden formula wheel for the high-end) and I think it’s been made to demonstrate what they can do to the best of their ability at this point in time - a showcase, essentially.
There’s no doubt that the GS takes heavy inspiration from Fanatec’s long serving and popular formula rim, which I’ve owned and used before, but I say this is no knock off. A knock off is an inferior product copying the original and hoping for success by association - this to me is an advancement of the thing it imitates. Believe me when I say that if I place one of these in your hands you’ll find more revolution than replication.
For your information - Moza Racing sent me the GS wheel free of charge for review, on my request due to my interest in the GS. Links for places to buy this are also provided below, and I give thanks to all of you for using them in the past.
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Overview
The Moza GS wheel costs around £450, which puts it in the mid range for a steering wheel in this day and age. The most important thing to know is that it fits that label, whereby a decent amount of wheel is provided to a decent level of finish - not boutique or luxury, but far from basic. For the money, you get a 300mm formula rim with suede grips, magnetic shifters, dual clutch paddles, excellent quick release, carbon front plate, metal dials and thumbwheels, 10 customisable backlit buttons and an onboard rev light.
It’s got some weight to it, but due to its shape that weight is concentrated near the centre making it more rotationally lightweight and responsive when your wheelbase is trying to act upon it, in particular if you’re choosing any Moza base below the R16, namely the R9 right now, then this does make a noticeable difference. In cars that really talk to you and track the road surface a lot, the improved response gives you an extra sprinkling of vibrance whilst driving them.
In the hand
Let’s do a little tour of the wheel, because there’s quite a lot to see.
The box is lovely, nice and clean. It’s one of those slidy-lid ones that you have to just hold in the air and wait for the goods to just plop out, like a baby horse being born.
Birthing it from the Moza branded dust bag, the first thing you’ll feel is the weight. It feels as packed and solid as you would expect for the price. It certainly doesn’t feel flimsy. I remember back in 2020 when I unboxed my Fanatec formula wheel, it felt so far above my trusty Logitech wheel that I couldn’t understand it. If I happened to be 2 years later to the party and bought the GS as my first midrange wheel today, I would feel just as amazed.
The grips are shodden in alcantara or suede, whatever your name for it. They’re a little bit on the spindly side, so if you’ve got massive builder’s hands you might find them somewhat thin. I’ll get back to these as one of my criticisms is about the grips.
The second thing you’re going to do is click those shifter paddles and this is one point I just wanna get in real quick. These are very loud as standard, too loud if you ask me. But there are rubber sound insulating pads included in the box which cut the volume dramatically, and only take 10 minutes to apply. I much prefer it with the paddles dampened and I’ll bet you will too. The noise of the shifter paddles rightly comes up a lot in multiple reviews of the GS, but I want to highlight that you don’t have to leave them like that, Moza anticipated this and provided the pads necessary if you want to change it. Either way, they are crisp with a strong polarisation between released and engaged. Just beneath the shifter paddles are the hand-clutches - these are vital for standing starts in anything with power, like Formula cars and cup cars. In conjunction with the Moza software, you can set these up to be basically perfect every time for those launches off the line.
Third thing you’ll do is press all the buttons, and these feel very nice, with a nice plunge-click feel that I saw someone describe somewhere as sort of like a mechanical keyboard. These come alive when the wheel is connected, so we’ll come back to those in a sec.
Next you’ll probably give all the front dials a twiddle. They’re machined from aluminium, and they have nice, clear steps between each notch on the faces. I don’t like the stickers beneath them, they stick out a bit on the otherwise stealthy aesthetic, but that’s a question of preference and I’ll bet you 50p right now that custom stickers will spring up on sale for these somewhere.
The thumb dials are very positive, with clear steps that make it difficult to accidentally double dip. Again they’re made of metal, not plastic.
Two twiddly sticks round out the wheel’s gadgetry, I use these for navigating menus and boxes.
The wheel feels really nice in-hand generally speaking, but in this state you’re only getting half the story so let’s slap it on this R9 wheelbase and I’ll show you the rest. To do that, we get to savour the momentary kashunk of the excellent quick release that Moza uses.
Button customisation
When powered, all the buttons on the GS wisp into life. I’ll tell you, I used it for about a week just like this, all buttons set to the default white, and thought this is pretty cool, very nice. Then I discovered that all the backlit buttons can be colour changed. This is a brilliant touch and not something you usually see at this sort of price. Sim racing is all about customisation, making something feel like it’s your own, and that includes colours, paints, liveries and so on. Assigning different colours to each button makes this wheel feel like you’re taking ownership - it’s yours now. Get creative with it.
If you drive with a team, for example, you could customise your buttons to match the colours under which you drive. If you are patriotically Spanish, customise the wheel accordingly.
It’s just buttons and lights, I know, but I already thought the wheel was pretty jazzy before I realised it could do this.
That rev limiter light at the top of the wheel is also customisable, but for some reason the limiter on the GS is not very bright - brightness is set to full, it just doesn’t seem very good at catching the corner of your eye whilst you’re focusing on the screen in front of you. Definitely not as bright as the rev lights on the CS hub, curiously. Would be nicer if it could be much more intense.
Driving
What’s it like to drive? Well, formula wheels are meant to make you feel like you’re in control of the most hardcore, advanced race cars whilst giving you as many buttons as you’d reasonably need for anything you’d want to drive, and the GS qualifies for this. There should be almost no vehicle you’re likely to come across in mainstream simulators whereby you find yourself drawing short of buttons to bind.
For me, the most button heavy cars I touch are GT cars and LMP1 cars in iRacing, and there’s plenty of wiggle room here to put things where I want them and still have room left for voice chat, exit and so on. I even bought F1 22 specifically to check it all works OK - everything binds up fine and in fairness the wheel itself gives you a serving suggestion where to put stuff which helps make the decision for you.
The hand-clutch is a fairly important feature to me. I do have an on-off relationship with the Radical SR10 on iRacing, which has standing starts that depend very much on controlled launches, much like all the Formula cars and Porsche Cup Car.
In the Moza Pit House software you can set the bite point, this means that once you’ve tested your standing starts a few times and found a clutch and throttle mix that gives you good launches consistently, you can maintain that bite point setting. Long story short, these dual clutch paddles work for what they’re intended for, and once moulded to you they become an essential tool.
Steering wheels are quite difficult to review because you can see what they look like, all you need to know is whether the product photos are representative of what you’ll get, and does it live up to how it looks. It could easily just be a yes or no question, so let’s do that.
Yes.
But not without some minor criticisms, which I'll recap:
The grips are a tad on the thin side, meaning that your index finger and thumb might feel like they’re overlapping a little too much, which gives you a cramped kinda feeling that you sorta know is there but you just can’t put your finger on, pun intended. It’s no deal breaker but I think a slightly thicker grip would be ideal.
What I also find is that my index fingers rest on the screw hole just above the grips (pictured above) which has a hard edge and spoils the otherwise well upholstered feel. The grip covering really needed to extend upwards to cover that for me.
I like the style of the rim overall but the backing stickers for the thumbdials are a style mismatch in my eyes. To create a lovely, forged carbon, stealthy wheel with teal-coloured accents and finish it off with 5 large, primary colour, 'fisher price' stickers in the middle is a minor misjudgment if you ask me.
Only other criticism besides that is the slightly dim rev limiter strip. More juice is needed in those bulbs to do their job, really, they could be brighter.
Conclusion
Overall though I’d say you do solidly get 450 quid’s worth of wheel and it does just as good a job for me as my old Fanatec formula wheel did, with some notable added goodies and tweaks that make this a better handling wheel, like that 300mm width, and some really nice additions like backlit buttons. The GS feels exactly how you think it should looking at the photos. It’s not deceptive, it’s genuinely well put together and proves to me that Moza Racing are able to at the very least match established hardware for quality, if not improve on it. Hopefully this is just the first of a long line and variety of wheels they turn out, because so far, so good. If you like how it looks, go for it.
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