Steering wheels have to be one of the most inconvenient of gaming peripherals. There’s cables dragging everywhere, clamps for nearby tables or desk that never quite sit right, or the space needed for a full stand or seating rig, if you’re truly going to commit. Equally, there are few add-ons that make games as gratifying to play. Hurtling around a race track while you feather the real-world throttle, using your paddles to gear change, all the while fighting against the bucking realism of force feedback, can make you feel like a virtual Colin McRae or Max Verstappen. If you’re into racing games, they make themselves more or less essential.
Turtle Beach know all this, and with the Racer Wireless Wheel for Xbox, PC and Android, they’ve tried to make a steering wheel that’s easier to live with. It’s one that’s designed to slot into your gaming life – and your living room – with a practised ease, parallel parking its way into your heart. Largely, they’ve achieved that.
The first thing you’ll think when you grab it out of the box, is just how good it feels. This is a premium-feeling wheel, despite coming in at £139.99/$179.99. It is largely made from a combination of matte and gloss black plastic, with some rubberised grip sections on the left and right of the wheel, but it’s solid, clean-feeling plastic, centred by a bright yellow cut-out at the top of the wheel, to provide a modicum of colour and pizazz.
While most wheels immediately have you looking for the nearest desk or table edge, the Racer Wireless Wheel gives you more options, starting with some metallic lap tray inserts. These slide into place at the bottom of the wheel, and you lock them with the same rotating mechanisms on the top of the device that you use for the deck clamps. The underside of the curved metal has rubberised grips, and once you’ve got it set in place on your lap, it mostly stays where you want it to be, thanks in part to the grips and thanks in part to the pleasing amount of weight in the main body.
The weight plays a role in making the Racer Wireless feel like a premium product, but it certainly helps it to behave more like a traditional wheel, even when it’s not attached to anything. Thankfully, you can lock it into place in a table with the simple clamps, and things feel exactly as you’d hope they would with it secured in place.
Serious racers will then ask, where are the pedals? The answer is, there aren’t any, with the Racer Wireless wheel dealing with accelerating and braking by mapping it onto some analogue paddles. You’ll notice that this completely does away with manual gear shifts, but it’s best to remember just who this wheel is aimed at: casual racers who want to feel more connected to their racing games. For that, it does a great job, injecting fun and a dose of realism in equal measure.
The lack of pedals makes the setup that much more streamlined and simple to use as well, and it makes the Racer Wireless a unique option. There’s an accessibility angle here as well, where this control set up makes it more suitable for games with  a disability or injury that would make pedals difficult or impossible to use.
Across the face of the wheel, you’ll find all of the central inputs you need, and they feel solid and well-made – particularly the D-pad. I had no problem cruising through menus and making changes to the options in Forza Horizon 5, and other than the occasional moment where you might lose the touch memory of where some of them are, like the dinky shoulder buttons, they do exactly what you need them to do.
There are two customisable function buttons on the left side of the wheel, which can replicate any of the other main inputs, as well as a multifunction button that opens up the Racer Wireless’ other abilities, particularly its audio controls via the 3.5mm socket. You’re getting a full suite of Turtle Beach audio options, including four EQ’s and then various adjustments to mic monitoring and the like, though you’ll need the app to get to all of them.
You can make a bevy of adjustments to the wheel’s performance via the Turtle Beach Control Center 2 app – available for both Xbox and PC – from updating the firmware for both your wheel and the wireless dongle, to digging into the nitty-gritty of the wheel’s setup. I made the change from 360-degree rotation to 180-degree here, and it made a huge difference to my interactions with the wheel, as it felt so much less cumbersome to turn when not attached to a desk.
You can also alter the input levels for both the left and right paddles, and the wheel itself, adjusting deadzones for all three, as well as choosing between standard, precision and fast response times. I found that Fast suited me well enough, and made the Racer Wireless feel massively responsive, if a bit twitchy at times. It’s great to have that level of granularity though, in something that is more or less aimed at the more casual racer.
In keeping with the more casual, no-frills approach, there’s no force feedback or vibration, but you might not miss it once you start hammering around the track. Without those features, the Racer Wireless is capable of up to 30 hours of battery life, and that played out in our testing. In fact, it also holds onto its charge remarkably well too, and after returning from a week’s holiday, it had lost just a couple of percent.
The clear thing that was apparent from my time with the Racer Wireless wheel, was just how much fun I was having. It isn’t a one-to-one recreation of driving – far from it – but it does make racing games like Forza Horizon 5 come alive when you’re comparing it to a controller. It’s straightforward, and nearly as easy to pick up and play with as a regular controller. While I did once lose the 2.4Ghz dongle, there’s a handy slot in the base to keep it in when not in use, and you can always opt to go wired instead.
There was the occasional niggle. The selector switch at the side gives you two Xbox options, one for a wheel, and one for a controller where there’s no steering wheel option, but in F1 2025, it wouldn’t recognise either for driving the car. There is a sturdy list of supported games for both Xbox and PC, but F1 2025 isn’t currently listed, despite the previous two entries being there. Here’s hoping that more games are added in the near future.
