F1 25 Controller Settings (PS5, Xbox, PC)

I’m a sim racer and amateur racer with a passion for Motorsport, good racecraft and the technical and setup aspect of sim racing.

F1 25 on a pad is punishing if you’ve left it on default. Modern F1 cars have so much downforce and ground-effect grip that a tiny stick movement at speed turns into a snap; brake too hard at a low-speed corner and you’ll lock up and miss the apex. The right controller settings smooth out that knife-edge, and they’re different on PS5, Xbox and PC. Below are the 2026 community baselines for each platform – steering, throttle, brake and rumble values, with the platform-specific quirks you need to know – then how to graduate to a wheel when the pad starts to feel like the bottleneck.

Why F1 25 punishes pad players

The thing F1 25 demands and the pad doesn’t naturally give you is fine-grained, smooth steering input. A real F1 wheel rotates 360 degrees; a controller stick rotates about 30 degrees of physical movement total. The game scales that up, which means tiny stick flicks at high speed translate to huge steering inputs in-car – and once you’ve upset the aero, the snap oversteer is almost impossible to catch.

The settings below address that two ways. Steering Linearity flattens the response curve in the middle of the stick travel (where most of your driving lives), so small movements give small inputs. And Throttle Linearity does the same for the right trigger, so you can feed power in progressively out of a low-speed corner without lighting the rears up. Get those two right and F1 25 stops fighting you. The same logic applies on every platform, but the exact values differ because the hardware is different.

PS5 DualSense settings

PS5 has the best controller for F1 25 by a fair margin, mainly because of the adaptive triggers. Set the in-game trigger resistance to Strong and the right trigger tension breaks as the rear tyres lose grip – you actually feel the moment the wheels start spinning, which is information no other platform’s pad gives you. The community baseline runs the higher Steering Rate and higher Throttle Linearity to suit the DualSense’s slightly squishier stick feel.

Setting	PS5 DualSense value
Steering Rate	120-145%
Steering Deadzone	0 (raise to 2-3 if you have stick drift)
Steering Linearity	30
Steering Saturation	0
Throttle Deadzone	0
Throttle Linearity	60-75
Throttle Saturation	0
Brake Deadzone	0
Brake Linearity	35
Brake Saturation	0
Vibration & FFB Strength	120 (max)
On-Track Effects	20
Rumble Strip Effects	40
Off-Track Effects	15
Adaptive Trigger Resistance	Strong

Sources: r/F1Game baseline mega-threads, plus pad creators on YouTube (Tomos UK, JK Gameplay) testing across the F1 24 and F1 25 cycles.

Xbox Series X|S settings

The Xbox controller doesn’t have adaptive triggers, but it does have impulse triggers – small rumble motors in the triggers themselves. That gives you a different but useful information channel: localised vibration through the brake and throttle when the tyres are working. To make sure that signal isn’t drowned out, the community pattern on Xbox is to keep On-Track and Off-Track FFB effects lower than on PS5, so the trigger feedback comes through cleanly. Xbox sticks also have slightly worse drift tolerance, hence the small steering deadzone.

Setting	Xbox Series X\|S value
Steering Rate	100-120%
Steering Deadzone	2-4
Steering Linearity	25
Steering Saturation	0
Throttle Deadzone	0
Throttle Linearity	40-50
Throttle Saturation	0
Brake Deadzone	0
Brake Linearity	30
Brake Saturation	0
Vibration & FFB Strength	110
On-Track Effects	20
Rumble Strip Effects	35
Off-Track Effects	15

Sources: Tomos UK and Sim Racing Setups Xbox baseline videos, r/F1Game Xbox community threads.

PC settings

On PC there’s an extra layer to manage – Steam Input. If you’re playing through Steam (which most people are), Steam applies its own deadzones to whatever pad you’re using, and those stack with the in-game F1 25 deadzones, which is why so many PC pad players quietly suffer from understeer they can’t explain. Open the controller’s properties in Steam, turn the native deadzones off, and let F1 25 do the work. Also: if you’re on a DualSense via Bluetooth, switch to wired – polling rate goes from around 250Hz to 1000Hz and the throttle response sharpens noticeably.

Setting	PC value (any pad)
Steering Rate	120%
Steering Deadzone	0 (manage in Steam)
Steering Linearity	25
Steering Saturation	0
Throttle Deadzone	0
Throttle Linearity	40
Throttle Saturation	0
Brake Deadzone	0
Brake Linearity	30
Brake Saturation	0
Vibration & FFB Strength	100
On-Track Effects	15
Rumble Strip Effects	30
Off-Track Effects	10

Sources: JK Gameplay PC pad benchmarks, r/F1Game PC threads on Steam Input deadzone stacking.

Common mistakes pad players make

Flicking the stick rather than rolling it. Flicking the left stick side to side unsettles the aero and triggers snap oversteer. The community fix: push the stick fully forward and roll it round the rim of the housing. It mimics a steering wheel’s smooth arc and you stop binning the car at every direction change.
Copying Esports wheel setups. Setups from creators like Aarava or Tiametmarduk are built around a wheel’s front-end bite and will feel undrivable on a pad. Soften the front suspension a couple of clicks and run a little more rear downforce than the wheel baseline – it gives the rear the stability the pad can’t give you.
Mashing the throttle in low gears. F1 25 punishes torque spikes in slow corners – Bahrain Turn 1 is the classic. Short-shift up to 3rd or 4th earlier than you’d think, and the higher Throttle Linearity in the tables above will do the rest.
Maxing every rumble setting “for immersion”. Cranking On-Track and Rumble Strip effects to 100 buries the actual grip-loss signal under environmental noise. Keep overall FFB Strength high (110-120 on PS5, 100-110 elsewhere), but drop the track effects to 15-30 so the pad only really hammers when you’re losing traction.
Leaving Understeer Enhance ON. This goes for wheel and pad. It makes the controls go artificially limp to “warn” you about understeer, but it actually masks the real information. Off, every time.

Ready to upgrade to a wheel?

If you’ve dialled the pad in and you’re still hitting a ceiling – missing apexes by tiny margins, struggling with mid-corner adjustments, can’t get consistent qualifying laps – a wheel is what unlocks the next step. F1 25’s physics are built around a wheel; the pad is doing a translation job to a steering input it wasn’t designed for. Even a budget entry wheel transforms what you can feel through the front tyres, and a load-cell brake makes you measurably more consistent on braking.

If you’re new to wheels, the cheapest credible routes are in our best F1 wheels for sim racing guide – it covers the Logitech G29 + rim mod budget route through to the mid and premium picks. Once you’ve got the wheel, our F1 25 wheel settings page has the baseline FFB for every major brand. And if you’re starting from scratch on a full rig, the F1 sim racing setup guide walks through cockpit, base, pedals, PC and screen.

Below are some of the mid-tier wheels people upgrade to when they outgrow the pad – around the GBP 500-900 mark, which is the sweet spot between “proper feel” and “still sensible money”: