Thrustmaster VG Thrustmaster T500 F1 Racing Wheel Add On

Customer Ratings:
List Price: $199.99
Sale Price: $162.98
Today's Bonus: 19% Off

This Wheel is great for F1 2011 on PS3. Everything else is a matter of adjustment for this type of wheel and your style. My understanding is that F1 wheels are 270 degree rotation in real life. So, I found for a lot of GT5 driving is better on original T500 RS wheel but, F1 still works well minus the rotation issues, F1 Add-on is a nice buy if you hate the T500 RS original shifting paddles. On the PC you can make adjustments for the wheel to work the way you want in fact you need to have installed a firmware update for the wheel to work correctly with PC or PS3.

The F1 Wheel is really for F1 2011 fans at current price for full wheel.

Overall happy with the add-on not sure about full T500 F1 you would want to have T500 RS GT5 wheel for the TH8 RS shifter for a good example. I hope Thrustmaster makes a GT5/6 type wheel with F1 style paddles that would be the best of all worlds for the non-F1 2011 fans.

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The wheel is made completely out of plastic. For 200 dollars you expect better materials. All center gages are fake. The five supposed buttons around the center ferrari gage are stikers. Over all don't buy. A waste of money, the original wheel attached to the t500 is of better quality. Hope this helps.

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Needless to say, this is an expensive "add-on" but still well worth it if you play Formula1 a lot and have some some spare change lying around. The firmware in the wheel has to be updated in order for the housing to recognize the wheel. The download worked exactly as described and the wheel functions normally. Far and away, the most significant feature of this wheel is the fact that the paddle shifters rotate with the wheel like every other wheel on the market (with the exception of the T500RS). I also discovered a feature not frequently talked about but true to actual F1 wheels ..... you can actually upshift and downshift with either paddle. If you configure the game to upshift with the right paddle and downshift with the left (customary) you can downshift with the right and upshift with the left by pushing the paddles forward instead of pulling them towards you. It may not sound like much but it can free one hand while you answer the phone or take a sip of coffee and still being able to up and down shift when needed with the remaining hand. The large rotary dials in the center section are non-functional and are visual esthetics only. The push buttons, toggle switches and two rotary thumb-wheels provide all the functions normally programmed by any game. Some people have complained about the buttons being hard to access while driving but this is a subjective perspective. It feels difficult at first, especially if you are switching from a wheel with the buttons closer, but after a couple days of racing, they fall into place accordingly. Same can be said for the D-Pads .... they are smaller and stiffer and feel different, but they just require getting used to them, that's all. Also, and very importantly, the GT wheel and the F1 Ferrari wheel can be switched out with each other in about 30 seconds once you've done it once. The wheel comfort isn't as good as the GT wheel but nothing to be concerned about.

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Why would this be a collector piece if the dials are not real and it really serves no purpose other than having the little Ferarri horse on it? Stupid if you ask me. Parts of it are metal, but it is still a plastic piece of junk. I certainly would expect more for the money they want for it. At least my porsche wheel is real like the real thing.

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I bought this wheel because the shifter in my regular TM T500RS was shifting two gears at the time. The process to get this fixed was painfully long with many e-mail exchanges. It took me at least a month and one half to get the original TM T500RS wheel's shifter fixed. So, in the mean time I bought the F1 adder so that I could continue playing. The bad thing is that after six or seven months of owning this F1 adder it too developed a shifting problem. The shifting mechanism has lost its "click" when I shift gears and it sometimes misses shifts. Very frustrating! Because of the numerous problems I have encountered with TM customer services department and the apparent products' sub-par quality, or in some cases, poor design of some key components, I have decided to throw these toys in the trash and I will be buying other brands that may not perform as well when playing but at least they will last a reasonable lenght of time! Read more reviews under the TM T500RS wheel to see othe problems with TM.