I have been meaning to do a Review of this steering wheel and pedals for at least 2 years now. Every time I was thinking about doing the Review something else came up and so the steering wheel got put on the back burner.

First let me say that I tried contact Logitech several times in hope to get in touch with someone there who could answer my questions. Surprisingly no one from Logitech was willing to take on questions that had to do with this steering wheel and pedals. Maybe they knew they would have a hell of a time defending shity design problems.

What really pissed me off the most about this steering wheel was it cost me $150.00 Canadian and for that I get something that fell apart in about 3 months time. For the hell of it before doing this article I decided I would check the locale store where I bought the wheel from and see what it cost today. Surprisingly enough it still cost $150.00 to buy the wheel and pedals.

In the picture below you will see two yellow arrows these arrows are pointing to the paddle shifters located on the left and ride side of the steering wheel. Under normal use a gamer would have these setup to do your up and down shifting in a racing game and thats how I had mine setup.

These paddle shifters is also where my problems started. Playing a racing game one day I went to shift up and I hit the paddle and nothing happen. I tried multiple times to shift up and still nothing. I tried setting the shift up in the racing game to another button on the wheel and that worked fine. After looking into this more closely I wasn’t hearing the clicking sound any more either that the paddle made when you used it.

Shortly after the up shifter paddle broke the down shift paddle broke next. It was the same issues with that one as well no more clicking sound and it simply would not work. So this is pretty good I haven’t even owned the thing that long and already the paddle shifters are trashed.

I decided I would take a look on the Internet at the time and see if anyone else had this problem and surprise surprise people did. One guy even showed people how to take the wheel apart and fix the problem. Apparently from what I read what happens is the paddle shifters are putting way to much load onto the switches that are in the wheel. The end result of this pressure is the switches are breaking the solder joints that holds the switch to the circuit board. This is why I also noticed the clicking sound gone. The reason there was no more clicking is the switches are not in contact with the paddle shifters do them breaking off the circuit board.

So despite the fact I was seriously not impressed with the paddle breakage I wasn’t that concerned because there are six buttons of the front of the wheel and I could set two of them to do the shifting.

Below is a picture of the pedals you get with the wheel. When you first look at them they seem like they will do the job and they should be trouble free.

WRONG!!!!

While investigating the paddle issues I was having, I was noticing something else while playing the race games. Every now and then when I would be playing I would have the gas pedal pushed down as far as I could and yet I was still not at 100% throttle in the game. The only thing that ever seemed to fix this annoying problem was to unplug the pedals from the wheel and then plug them back into the wheel. I’m guessing the wheel has some sort of auto calibration or something because for a while the pedal would work normally. When I say it worked for a while I’m referring to about 10 minutes of game time.

So after putting up with this for a bit I had enough. You cant play a race car game and then right in the middle of the game have your max throttle only be 80%. At this point in time I didn’t care if I void the warranty or not I was pissed right off so out come the screw driver.

In the next picture you can see the pedals apart and flipped over so you can see the guts of the pedals.

After taking the pedals and moving them as you would if you were stepping on them I began to see what the problem was. The brains over at Logitech when building the pedals thought it would be good to give the gas pedal (thats the yellow arrow on the left of the picture above) only one spring. The problem is the spring is on the left side of the pedal and the POT that the pedal is connected to is on the right side.

Where you get a problem with this is when the pedal is pushed down the pedal lifts up a bit on the right side where the POT is. What this does is lift the POT up just enough that its not held in place and so you can’t turn the shaft on the POT. All this leads to the problem I had where I couldn’t get 100% throttle on the pedals.

For those that don’t know a POT is like a mini volume knob when you turn the POT it sends that signal back to the controller and thats how the pedals work. When you push down on the pedal the shaft in the POT will get turned by the amount the pedals get pushed down. This is nothing new and joysticks have been based of these POTS for ever.

In the next picture I got a close up of the POT and of the little pedestal it sits on and this is also a problem. The POT is not in any way held down on that pedestal you can lift the POT right up. When you combine the fact the POT is not secured down to the pedestal and the spring is on the one side you end up with the problem I had.

As for the brake pedal if you look closely at the picture above (the pedal on the right hand side of the screen) you will notice that pedal has a spring on the left and right side of it so the lifting probably isn’t as bad for the brake pedal and could be why I never noticed a problem with it. I don’t use the brake as much as the gas though so it to may suffer from the POT moving as well like the gas pedal does.

I think what pissed me off the most is the fact if they had of thought about this they could have prevented this from happening in the first place. How hard would it be to give the gas pedal 2 springs and also mount the pot so it can’t move?

As for the actual wheel and the software that comes with the wheel for configuring it and the pedals I had no problem at all with that. In fact I like the software I even like how the wheel feels in your hand. As for the force feedback I’m not a real big fan of this so I had that off. The one thing about the force feedback is even when you have it totally off the wheel still feels stiff. The only time I feel the force feedback OFF completely is in the windows control panel and I have the screen up to test the buttons and calibration.

In case some of you are thinking why didn’t I take the wheel back the answer is simple. Here where I live if I had of tried to take it back when I noticed these issues it would have been to late. A lot of stores here give you maybe a month or a bit more to get your money back and I was past that. If I had of taken it back they would have gave me the same wheel and pedals again with the same flaws and no doubt in several months they to would have ended up broke.

On a side note when I first got my wheel I told my brother to get one because I thought they would turn out good. Well my brothers wheel is junk to now because the C clamp part that holds the wheel to the table snapped right off from the wheel. With the C clamp part busted you can’t even mount the wheel to a desk.

The other thing that bothers me about the steering wheels and pedals is it seems if you want a set that last for a long time and don’t break with in months you need to spend $1200 U.S to get something custom made to last.

If anyone out there who reads this knows of a good steering wheel and pedals for under $200 Canadian that can be used with modern games, and they don’t fall apart after 3 months post me a message about it on the games forum of this site.

In conclusion if your thinking about buying a Logitech MOMO I wouldn’t waste my time or the money on one. Its possible they have changed the paddles and the pedals since I bought mine but I don’t think they have at all. I think the real shame here is the fact companies like Logitech want to charge good money for stuff and yet you end up with junk. Whatever happen to the adage you get what you pay for?

WolfManz611..