Fanatec Podium Pedals: How to Order & Discount Code

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

Fanatec have finally shipped the Podium Pedals, and after years of waiting for a proper flagship set the headline is a 200kg load cell brake wrapped in forged aluminium and carbon fibre, for around £600. The short version: these are the best pedals Fanatec have ever made, and if you race on a console they are in a class of one. They are also a lot of money for two pedals, and they only make sense on a rig solid enough to earn it.

Firstly, the conclusion, because I don’t think it should be much of a surprise. Are they worth it? If you’re already on a Fanatec wheelbase, or you race on a PlayStation or Xbox, then yes – nothing else gets close for feel and adjustability on a console right now. If you’re on PC and open to anything, it’s more of a maybe, and I’ll explain why as we go. Either way this is a properly engineered bit of kit, so let’s get into what you’re paying for, how the brake works, and how to get hold of a set while they keep selling out.

Fanatec Podium Pedals Formula two-pedal set on a white kitchen worktop, showing the carbon faces, forged brake arm and gold compression cups — The Fanatec Podium Pedals Formula – a two-pedal set with a 200kg load cell brake. Product shot on the bench.

Where to buy: the Podium Pedals Formula are around £600 / €699.95 / $699.99 direct from Fanatec, and stock is thin – they’ve sold out fast on every drop so far. Order them from the Fanatec product page here, and use the code SIMRACINGCOCKPIT at checkout for 5% off. Prices shift by region and stock, so check the current figure before you commit.

What you get

The Podium Pedals come in two flavours: a three-pedal GT set with a clutch, and this two-pedal “Formula” set built for open-wheelers and prototypes where you don’t want a clutch cluttering up the footwell. Mechanically they’re the same pedals – the Formula just swaps in curved carbon heel cups and carbon plates instead of the flat GT footplates. So this is a throttle and a brake, and not a lot else, which is the first thing to get your head around when you see the price.

What you’re paying for is the brake, the materials and the adjustment. The brake runs a custom load cell that Fanatec rate at 200kg and calibrate to about 150kg of actual force at the pedal face. The arm it’s bolted to is forged aluminium, which you basically never see at this end of the market, and the faces and heel cups are thick moulded carbon fibre that doesn’t flex when you lean on it. In the box you also get a set of springs and elastomers to tune the brake with, plus a little config chart, and I’ll come back to those because they matter more than you’d expect.

The carbon faces are thick and rigid – they don’t give at all under your foot.

Specification	Value
Pedals	2 (throttle + brake) – “Formula” set
Brake sensor	200kg-rated load cell, calibrated to ~150kg at the pedal face
Brake adjustment	Compression Control System – four tool-free threaded cups, springs + elastomers
Brake travel	Roughly 44-60mm, adjustable down to almost nothing
Throttle sensor	Contactless Hall sensor, 16-bit (65,536 steps)
Materials	Forged aluminium brake arm, moulded carbon-fibre faces and heel cups
Connection	USB-C (PC) or RJ12 to a Fanatec wheelbase
Platforms	PC, PlayStation, Xbox (console via a compatible Fanatec base)
Onboard memory	Yes – your brake curves carry from PC to console
Price	~£600 / €699.95 / $699.99

The brake and the Compression Control System

This is the bit that justifies the pedals existing. The brake doesn’t use a simple stack of rubber elastomers like most load cell pedals. Instead Fanatec built what they call the Compression Control System: four knurled cups you screw in and out by hand, each holding a spring or an elastomer, and the whole lot sits in front of the load cell. Wind the cups out and you get a long, soft, road-car pedal. Wind them fully closed and the travel basically disappears and you’re pushing into what one reviewer nicely described as a brick wall, which is silly for actual driving but tells you the range on offer. Everything useful lives in between.

The clever part is what the cups do mechanically. Because they bottom out against each other at a set point, they cap how far the elastomers can ever be squashed, so the elastomers don’t slowly get crushed and go off the way they do on cheaper pedals. It’s a tidy solution to the one thing that ages a load cell brake, and the fact you can do all of it by hand, in a minute, with no tools, is the sort of thing you don’t appreciate until you’ve been swearing at a bag of Allen keys under your desk.

Rear view of the Fanatec Podium Pedals showing the threaded compression cups and coil spring of the Compression Control System — The Compression Control System – four threaded cups holding springs and elastomers, all adjusted by hand.

So how does it feel? My notes from the first proper session went something like this: firm, fast to build pressure, and the carbon heel cups keep your foot planted so nothing slides around while you’re trail braking. When I drove a Radical SR3 for real my peak brake pressure was around 85kg, and this cell is calibrated to about 150kg at the face, so you are not going to run out of brake. That’s the good news, and it’s real.

The thing I kept reaching for and not quite finding, at least on the springs it ships with, is a clearly defined threshold point – that hard wall near the end where you know you’re at maximum and can lean on it the same way every lap. Out of the box the pedal feels a touch linear, and I found myself a shade less consistent than I am on a firmer set. None of that is the mechanism’s fault. It’s the factory choice of springs and elastomers, not the brake design, and swapping the first-stage spring for something softer brings the threshold back. There’s a whole set of springs in the box to play with, the elastomers are a standard size so third-party ones fit, and there’s a little tool for recording your cup measurements so you can recreate a setting you liked. Half the fun of a pedal like this is dialling it in, and you should expect to spend an evening doing exactly that rather than bolting it in and racing.

Close-up of the green and blue tuning springs inside the Fanatec Podium Pedals Compression Control System — Two green and two blue springs plus four elastomers come in the box – the brake feel is yours to tune.

One practical note if you do start swapping bits: recalibrate afterwards, and use the Advanced menu to calibrate the brake specifically, because the main calibrate button only sorts the throttle. It caught me out and it’ll catch you out too.

The throttle, the carbon and the build

The throttle is a contactless Hall sensor running at 16-bit resolution, which is a fancy way of saying it reads your foot in very fine steps. What you notice more, though, is that it’s stiff – deliberately so. There’s no soft, floppy travel like you get on budget pedals; you have to mean it, and in return you always know exactly where your foot is on the pedal. I like it. If you’re coming off something like the CSL pedals it’ll feel like a different sport. The one catch is you can’t make it lighter, because there’s no softer throttle spring supplied, so if you prefer a feather-light throttle this won’t be your thing.

The build is where the money shows. That forged aluminium brake arm is unusual at any price in sim racing, and it means there’s no give in the pedal when you stamp on it. The carbon faces and heel cups are properly thick – the sort of thing you could almost hang on the wall – and they don’t bend at all. It’s a lovely bit of engineering, and it photographs even better than it looks in person, which is saying something.

Detail of the forged aluminium brake arm on the Fanatec Podium Pedals, stamped FORGED — A forged aluminium brake arm – stamped FORGED, and rare at this end of sim racing.

It’s not perfect, and it would be a poor review that pretended otherwise. Two things came up for me and for every reviewer I trust. The powder-coated finish marks more easily than you’d want on a £600 product – it can flake a little when you’re adjusting pedal height, so go carefully. And the bolts are soft: I’d treat them with kid gloves, because more than one experienced reviewer has stripped one with very little force. There’s also a very subtle side-to-side wobble in the brake arm that shouldn’t really be there. None of these are dealbreakers, and none of them affect how the pedals drive, but at this price you notice them.

Mounting them, and why your rig matters

The thing that decides whether these are worth it for you has nothing to do with the pedals. You’re pushing up to 150kg of real force into them. If your rig can’t take that without flexing, you throw away everything the load cell is trying to give you, because the whole assembly bends instead of the sensor reading a clean input. I’ve seen reviewers get flex not just in the pedal deck but in the seat itself, with a seat mounting screw working loose under heavy braking. If that’s you, a dab of threadlock is your friend, but the real answer is a rigid cockpit. If you’re running a flimsy fold-up frame, spend the money there first and come back to these later.

Fanatec Podium Pedals mounted on a Fanatec cockpit rig pedal plate — Bolted to a stiff cockpit – which is exactly what a 150kg pedal set needs to work properly.

The good news is you don’t need Fanatec’s separate pedal plate to do it. That plate is around £200 and, being blunt, I wouldn’t buy it – the Formula’s integrated carbon heel cups let you hard-mount each pedal straight to a rigid rig, and you can invert them too. If your cockpit has a solid pedal deck with slotted channels, you can bolt these in basically anywhere. One thing to watch: the pedal plate on these is taller than most, so you may need to drop your mounting position a touch to keep a comfortable leg angle. If you’re shopping for something to bolt them to, our guide to the best sim racing cockpits is the place to start, and a few of the stiffer options are below.

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On the connection side, these are more flexible than you might assume. You can plug them straight into a PC over USB-C, which means you can run the best brake Fanatec have ever made on a Simucube or a Moza base if that’s what you own – you’re not locked into a Fanatec wheelbase to use them on PC. For console, it’s the usual Fanatec story: they work on PlayStation and Xbox, but only through a platform-compatible Fanatec base, not on their own. And because your brake curves save to onboard memory, you can dial everything in on PC and it carries over to your console session, which is quietly one of the best things about them. One old gotcha is gone, too – the fault where plugging in USB and the wheelbase at the same time could fry the electronics has been fixed, so you can hot-adjust on PC with the base still connected.

How they compare

The obvious comparison is Fanatec’s own ClubSport V3, which has served people brilliantly for years and runs a 90kg load cell. The Podium jumps to a 200kg-rated cell, forged aluminium and carbon, and the tool-free Compression Control System, so it’s a real step up in feel, adjustability and build. Whether that step is worth roughly £170 more than a V3 depends entirely on how seriously you take your braking. For a lot of people the V3, or even a CSL set with the load cell kit, is already plenty. The rest of Fanatec’s pedal range is below, so you can see where the Podium sits.

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Look outside Fanatec and it gets more interesting. Against a Heusinkveld Sprint the Podium’s out-of-the-box brake feels a touch less defined until you re-spring it, though it fights back on adjustability and console support. A Moza CRP2 gives you three pedals and a 200kg cell for a good chunk less money, if you don’t need the Fanatec ecosystem. And then there’s the awkward one: for £600-plus, the market has moved on to active pedals – the Simucube ActivePedal, Moza’s MBooster – that can simulate ABS, lock-ups and kerb feel a passive load cell simply can’t. More than one reviewer landed on the same slightly deflated note, that this is the best load cell pedal you can buy in a world where the flagship conversation has shifted to haptics. That’s fair. It’s also fair to say active pedals cost more, need a serious rig even more than these do, and are still a niche. Where the Podium wins outright is the console space – these are comfortably the best pedals you can natively run on a PlayStation or Xbox today.

The two carbon-fibre footplates included with the Fanatec Podium Pedals Formula — The carbon footplates that come with the Formula set – part of what you’re paying for.

How to order them (and the discount code)

The blunt bit of buying advice first: getting hold of a set is currently the hardest part. Fanatec have sold through every batch quickly, and at the time of writing the Formula set shows as unavailable more often than not. So the plan is less “click buy” and more “be ready when they restock.”

Head to the Podium Pedals Formula product page, and if it’s out of stock, set up the restock notification so you get an email the moment a batch lands – they don’t hang around. When you do check out, use the code SIMRACINGCOCKPIT for 5% off, which on a £600 pedal set is a useful chunk back in your pocket. If you want to double-check the code is live or hunt for anything better, our guide to Fanatec discounts keeps track, and the Fanatec hub page has the current deals.

The Fanatec Podium Pedals product page showing pricing and ordering options — The Fanatec product page – set a restock alert if the Formula set is showing as unavailable.

Two more things before you spend. First, the three-pedal GT version with a clutch has been delayed – a quality issue with the clutch pushed it back – so if you specifically want three pedals, you’re waiting a while yet, or buying the clutch separately later. Second, there are a couple of holes on the back of each pedal that Fanatec have confirmed are for a future haptic module, the kind of thing that’d buzz for ABS or a lock-up. No detail on price or timing, so I’d buy these for what they do today and treat any haptic add-on as a bonus if it ever turns up. We’ll see.

Pros

Outstanding build – forged aluminium brake arm and thick, rigid carbon that doesn’t flex under load.
The Compression Control System is fast, tool-free, hugely adjustable, and the cups stop the elastomers wearing out.
A stiff, precise throttle that tells you exactly where your foot is.
The best pedals you can natively use on a PlayStation or Xbox, with curves that carry over from PC.

Cons

£600 for two pedals – the same price as the three-pedal set – is a lot, however good they are.
Out of the box the brake lacks a clear threshold point until you swap the springs.
Soft bolts and a finish that marks easily let the fit-and-finish down at this price.

Who should buy them

Buy these if you’re already in the Fanatec ecosystem and want the best brake they make, or if you race on a console and have been stuck with lesser pedals for years – on PlayStation and Xbox this is as good as it currently gets, and it isn’t close. They’re also a strong shout if you love tinkering, because the adjustment range is enormous and dialling in your own brake feel is a proper weekend project rather than a chore.

Look elsewhere if you’re purely on PC and chasing the last word in immersion, where an active pedal will do things these can’t, or if you’re on a budget, where a good load cell set for a third of the money will get you most of the way there. And if you fancy the challenge, our DIY load cell pedal guide shows just how much of this you can build yourself for a fraction of the outlay. Less is more, and there’s no shame in starting simpler.

Final thoughts

So, are the Fanatec Podium Pedals worth it? For the right person, yes, and without much hesitation. They’re the best pedals Fanatec have ever made, the brake mechanism is a lovely piece of engineering, and on a console they stand alone. The caveats are all about context rather than the product: they cost a lot for two pedals, they need a rigid rig and an evening of spring-swapping to show their best, and in an era of active pedals a pure load cell no longer feels like the last word it once did. Buy them knowing what they are, put them on something solid, take the time to tune the brake, and I think you’ll be very happy.

If you do grab a set, don’t forget the code SIMRACINGCOCKPIT for 5% off, and set that restock alert – they sell out fast. Enjoy the tinkering, and I’ll see you out on track!