iRacing Simagic Settings: SimPro Manager & the Wheel Return Speed Trap

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

If you’ve come to iRacing from Assetto Corsa with the same Simagic base, the temptation is to leave Wheel Return Speed at 0. Do that and iRacing’s centring will feel heavy, slightly sluggish, and oddly disconnected – like there’s a lazy spring fighting you halfway through every corner exit. The fix is one number: set Wheel Return Speed to 100 in SimPro Manager. AC and iRacing handle caster trail differently. AC’s rack physics fight an active return-spring assist, which is why the 0 setting works there. iRacing’s FFB is also rack-derived but expects the assist to be running, and the centring feels wrong without it. It’s a five-second change once you know, and the kind of thing that catches Simagic users every time they switch sims.

The rest of the setup is straightforward, and that’s not an accident – SimPro Manager is one of the cleanest software stacks in DD wheelbase land. Three sliders that genuinely matter (Smoothness, Friction, Damper), in-game Wheel Force matches your base’s actual Nm output, Min Force at 0. The Alpha series in iRacing is a properly enjoyable combo when set up right.

SimPro Manager setup for iRacing

The Smoothness slider is the one that scales most obviously with base torque. The Alpha Mini at 10Nm benefits from a touch more Smoothness (2-3) to take the edge off iRacing’s high-frequency signal. The Alpha U at 23Nm gets the opposite treatment – 0-1, because the higher torque already amplifies subtle differences, and over-smoothing on a 23Nm motor flattens the slip-angle cues you actually paid for. Mech Friction at 10-15 adds genuine mechanical-feeling mass through the centre of the wheel without numbing peripheral information.

Setting	Alpha Mini (10Nm)	Alpha (15Nm)	Alpha U (23Nm)
Total Force	100	100	100
Smoothness	2-3	1-2	0-1
Wheel Return Speed	100	100	100
Mech Friction	10	10-15	10-15
Mech Damper	5	10	10-15
Mech Inertia	0	0-5	5
Suspension / Road / Effects	0	0	0

The Suspension / Road / Effects sliders stay at zero because iRacing’s FFB is steering-rack derived rather than canned-effect. Layering SimPro Manager’s effects over iRacing’s already-clean signal creates double-counted detail that ends up muddier than either layer alone. Leave them off.

In-game iRacing settings

Wheel Force matches your base’s actual Nm output – 10 for the Mini, 15 for the Alpha, 23 for the Alpha U. Damping stays at 0 because SimPro Manager handles damping properly. Min Force stays at 0 because Simagic is direct drive – there’s no centre slack to bridge. Linear Mode ticked. Max Force calibrated per car via Auto.

Setting	Alpha Mini	Alpha	Alpha U
Wheel Force	10 Nm	15 Nm	23 Nm
Damping	0%	0%	0%
Min Force	0%	0%	0%
Use Linear Mode	Yes	Yes	Yes
Max Force GT3 after Auto	~35-40 Nm	~45-50 Nm	~50-55 Nm

Why Wheel Return Speed differs between AC and iRacing

This deserves the deeper explanation because it’s genuinely a quirk and the kind of thing that’s nearly impossible to debug if you don’t know it’s a sim-specific difference.

Assetto Corsa’s force feedback is calculated almost entirely from steering rack and suspension geometry forces. The rack itself wants to return to centre through caster trail – that’s basic vehicle dynamics, and AC simulates it accurately. Adding SimPro Manager’s Wheel Return Speed on top of that is double-counting the same effect, fighting the tyre’s own self-aligning torque. The result is a wheel that feels rubbery on corner exits because two competing centring forces are pulling against each other.

iRacing’s FFB is also rack-derived but the implementation expects an active centring assist running underneath. Turn off Wheel Return Speed in SimPro Manager on iRacing and the centring feels sluggish and weighty in a way that has no real-world equivalent. It’s not subtle – within a corner or two you’ll know something’s wrong, you just won’t know what.

The fix is genuinely one slider. Same SimPro Manager. Same Simagic base. Different sim. If you’re swapping between iRacing and AC in the same evening – which a lot of us are – save two SimPro Manager profiles with that single number flipped between them. Worth the thirty seconds of setup time.

Loading products...

Common Simagic + iRacing mistakes

Wheel Return Speed at 0 (the AC carryover). Centring feels heavy and sluggish in iRacing. Set to 100. Save two SimPro Manager profiles for AC vs iRacing.
Wheel Force not matching base Nm. Mini = 10, Alpha = 15, Alpha U = 23. Mismatch causes either clipping or hollow feedback – both feel equally wrong.
Linear Mode unticked. Raw 1:1 telemetry is the whole point of DD. Always ticked.
Min Force above 0. Robotic centre rattle. 0% always on DD.
Smoothness above 4 on the Alpha U. Over-smoothing on a 23Nm motor mutes the slip-angle information you’re paying for. Drop to 0-1.
Never hitting Auto on a new car. Max Force is per-car telemetry, not a global setting. Map a button, drive a clean lap, hit Auto. The single biggest iRacing FFB improvement most users can make.

Once Wheel Return Speed is right and your Wheel Force matches your base, Simagic on iRacing is genuinely one of the cleaner setups in the brand list. The wider iRacing matrix is iRacing FFB settings, the AC companion is Assetto Corsa wheel settings if you want to see the inversion of this page, and the wider Simagic lineup is in our Simagic buyer’s guide.

Sources: Simagic official Discord iRacing channel, r/Simagic community profiles, Boosted Media Alpha series iRacing reviews.