Moza Vision GS Steering Wheel Review: A Wheel That Surprises

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Featured Image: Moza Vision GS Sim Racing Wheel

Today, I’m excited to take a close look at the surprising new addition to the Moza stable: the Vision GS sim racing wheel.

It is a surprise because it’s a more premium design that we’ve so far been accustomed to from Moza Racing. I’d position this outside Moza’s usual budget to the mid-price range, and place this wheel more in the mid to higher-end range. It’s a wheel designed to compete with manufacturers like Fanatec, or higher up the price range, even Cube Controls.

As a statement of intent, Vision GS is a clear milestone for Moza, and in the future, I’m certain their strategy is to refine their product until they’re market dominant. Timing wise, there’s certainly an opportunity for them as we watch Fanatec’s bankruptcy proceeding play out.

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So, how does it stack up on my simulator?

First impressions

Any sim racer will see from the photos, the Vision GS has a standout, GT-style design, almost like a figure of 8. It’s of significantly higher build quality than I perhaps expected, hopefully, the photos do this justice.

The design of the paddles is a step forward, with neat aluminium paddle bodies incorporating a clutch and shifter on each side of the wheel chassis.

The Moza QR connector is rock solid – it mounts just as well as my Simucube SQR and there’s no play whatsoever. With two additional adapter plates, it mounts very well to the Simucube 2 Pro, mounting the wheel is something I’ll talk about in a moment.

The paddles and clutch are slightly noisier than they need to be (they’re not at all loud, just not quite in keeping with the current approach of adding slight dampening to fully minimise noise). Again, the noise is not significant, I just noticed it because my current wheel, the Ascher Racing Mclaren Artura, has solved this problem in the paddle design.

The leather grips feel good, the ergonomics of the actual rim are less sophisticated than some of the very high-end wheels we’ve seen, but, it feels like a typical sportscar rim in use and the tactile feel through the leather grip is nicely done.

On first power up the wheel grabs your attention; the LED default colour scheme is excellent, the centre display screen has good contrast and the touch interface to change the screen page is a nice touch.

The default displays are useful; I like the timing screen as that for me is the most accessible and useful for my current level of development and the self-levelling feature is a novel, but useful idea for quick glances at the timing screen.

I ran the wheel before installing the calibration and control software: Pit House. I did check and unfortunately, there’s no SimHub support.

Pit House is necessary for firmware updates and the Vision GS screen editor, but it would be nice to have Simhub as an option for the more mundane tasks (RPM LED management and profiles, for example).

The QR / USB extension hub kit doesn’t support a Simucube 2 Pro, so I ordered a Sim Racing Machines 70mm PCD hub adapter that allowed me to mount the Moza adapter’s 70mm PCD drilled holes.

Naturally, it would be welcome to have Simucube 2 support on a revised adapter plate, the problem being it’s not a 3-hole 50mm PCD. Simucube uses an irregular offset that requires a specially drilled adapter.

While the buttons are all excellent, there’s a tiny bit of lateral play in the rotaries. This is very common with wheel manufacturers and, by comparison, it’s within reasonable tolerance. I think only VPG has nailed this (with my feedback) – they devised a washer to fit around the shaft of the rotary that sat flush in the casing. This stopped the rotary shaft from moving.

Unboxing

The Vision GS comes in a nice tidy package, with the wheel front and centre of the offering. The QR hub is pre-installed, so, apart from the stickers there’s very little else to do other than get the thing out ready for a drive. It comes with a storage bag to keep the dust away and a sticker set too:

I generally avoid putting stickers on review wheels, just in case the manufacturer asks me to forward the device elsewhere after I’ve finished. A fully stickered Vision GS does look good:

Materials and Manufacture

As I’ve mentioned already, the overall presentation of this wheel is pretty exceptional.

You don’t sense this is a budget wheel or anything close for that matter. The overall build of the wheel is a combination of composite and aluminium.

Composite is a material that you shouldn’t avoid in high tensile situations as it’s stiffer than aluminium (check out Young’s Modulus of elasticity of composite vs aluminium). To combine the two gives a nice aesthetic, but it’s a deliberate choice.

A stiffer wheel design means a better FFB feel.

The back plate is aviation-grade alloy, with the Moza wheel side QR hub mounted to the backplate. I must say, I’m impressed with what the Moza QR hub is capable of at high detail / high torque levels.

Simucube’s 2 Pro is capable of 25Nm peak torque at an exquisite level of detail. I’m pleased to report that the wheel communicates the FFB nicely and doesn’t leave anything off the table.

The encoders and thumb wheels are all aluminium, and the shifter/clutch paddles are also aluminium.

The grip, which is silky and smooth to the touch is covered with hand-stitched microfiber leather.

Mounting

Hopefully, there aren’t many (any?) other reviews where the VGS has been mounted to a Simucube 2 Pro.

While I have the R5 and the R3 here, I wanted to see how this wheel would perform in my “high-end” racing simulator. It might not be as perfectly arranged as some of the Youtubers, but it’s “got it where it counts”.

Mounting took longer than I’d hoped. I’d expected that mounting would be a simple matter of removing the Moza hub from the back of the wheel and replacing it with my SQR. This was wrong.

The hub as I found out, isn’t designed to be removed easily. I did think to have a peek inside the casing but, the grub screws on the rotaries are over torqued and one of the screws allowed my Allen key to slip. So, the rotary is never coming off thanks to the slipped grub screw and therefore, the case is never coming apart. Time for plan B.

Moza has a solution for people who want to run Moza wheels on non-Moza wheelbases. It’s a universal QR / USB adapter kit called the Moza Universal Hub Kit. It comes with a little box to convert the Moza RJ12 connection to USB. There’s also a hub adapter plate.

The adapter plate supports the 70mm PCD (and 50mm PCD) fitments for Fanatec and Asetek but not the 3-hole offset triangular arrangement that a Simucube hub uses (if you remove the SQR plate). If you check the website it does show an SQR hub, but that’s the wheel side end, not the wheelbase hub end:

Not to worry, as Sim Racing Machines have a Simucube hub to 70mm PCD adapter plate that does the job.

That’s why this review is a little later than I’d hoped, although Moza dispatched the universal adapter kit and that arrived within 5 days. SRM’s adapter was the next day, so in a week the fitting issue was resolved.

Fitting the wheel, with the supplied countersunk M5 bolts included in the Moza adapter kit was easy. When the wheel went on, it looked good:

Software Installation

Pit House controls and configures all Moza hardware.

I’ve featured it with every Moza review I’ve ever done, Download and install Moza Pit House (if you don’t have it installed already), and activate the wheel as a new device. You’ll find this screen in Pit House:

My wheel firmware was up to date, but Pit House considers the display a separate device. In my case, a firmware update was needed.

The “One click to upgrade all” button looks after this for you.

Inside the Steering Wheel Settings, you can configure the button brightness, RPM LED brightness, calibrate the paddles (recommended before play), and modify the clutch behaviour from “axis combine”, “Axis Split” or “Button”. Axis combine is the setting you’d need for a Formula start (paddle 1: bite point, paddle 2: release).

You can check the behaviour of the paddles and buttons in real-time in the UI, so this is just something worth getting to know before you go racing.

The RPM indicator has its own tab with settings including RPM indicator timing, “mode” (display RPM as a percentage of the actual RPM), blink intervals and LED colour.

Finally, there are telemetry mode settings that allow you to enable or disable the warnings for wheel slip, TC and flags.

The dashboard settings tab deals with the centre display. You can select from a group of preset dashboards (left) or follow this tutorial to build your own.

The dashboard settings editor is a major feature for Moza. This is where you can customise your dashboard with your logo, which is nice to have, particularly if you run professional simulator installations or competitions.

So, how does it feel?

Overall I like this wheel. In the context of a Moza-compatible device, this is very clearly the best sim racing wheel Moza has to offer. I very much admire their step forward in features and software. While the dashboard customisation is a novelty, we have had customisable dashboards for years. The uniqueness, in my opinion, is the self-levelling feature. This made the data an awful lot easier to consume:

I also like a 310mm diameter wheel. There’s no way Moza could have used a smaller rim because the might not be enough space between the rim and the button box. I find slightly larger wheels allow for smoother driving – I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to wheel size, put simply, it feels good, it’s ergonomically good enough and it works well.

As a few other reviewers have pointed out, the paddles have a nice, immediate and snappy feel to them, but just a little noisier than the quieter wheels like the Artura Pro. I’d place the noise level to be on par with the Cube Controls GTX2. Paddle noise is a minor issue in a good overall package and one that I can’t help but feel competes directly with the GTX2.

The screen is a novel, useful feature in the wheel. The default displays are more than enough to get going, with my preference being the easily read lap timing / delta screen. It’s easy to refer to this as “gyroscopic rotation” but that would be technically incorrect. There isn’t a gyro running in this wheel. It’s most likely using an accelerometer or a combination of an accelerometer and magnetometer. These are small, inexpensive electronic components that can detect orientation, they can be mounted to a PCB and are probably integrated into the display component itself.

This would explain why Pit House “sees” the display as a separate device from the VGS. Reorientation is just a bit “choppy” but I don’t think this matters. The data is easily and quickly read. Uncomplicated and easy to interpret.

Based on this I’d expect the display screen to appear in other Moza devices if the Vision GS is as successful as I think it will be. Particularly if you’re a Moza wheelbase owner, I think you’ll be very happy with this wheel as an upgrade.

Here’s the Moza Vision GS pricing by country:

USD $749.00
EUR €829.00
GBP £749.00
AUD 1,299.00
JPY 119,900.00

And you can learn more about the Moza Vision GS (and buy it) from Moza’s website here.

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Topic: Sim Racing Wheels