Cube Controls Formula Sport Wireless Sim Wheel – my review 8
Cube Controls have a reputation for exceptional detail and usability in their sim racing wheels. Even their entry level units such as the Formula Sport and Formula Sport Wireless have a build quality that is a universe beyond your typical everyday Formula style wheel.
At more than twice the price of say, a Fanatec Clubsport Formula Carbon wheel, is this money well spent?
Happily, it’s my job to find out. Today, we’re looking at the Formula Sport offering from Cube Controls and even better, it’s the wireless option supported by the wireless integration featured on the Simucube 2 Pro.
Unboxing the device reveals an instruction manual, a sheet of bright decals for your own customization and button mapping, a USB cable, a Cube Controls bag to keep the wheel dust free when out of use and a small accessories bag with a variety of bolts, Allen keys and tweezers for applying the stickers.
The wheel
Firstly lets take a look at the wheel itself. The face plate is a 4mm thick carbon offering with a nice lacquered carbon weave finish. The embossed Cube Controls logo in the carbon is very nicely painted – it really looks like a professional racing wheel.
The rubber grips are quite striking, as they’re clearly a major piece of the design and seem well integrated. I’ll later learn what a joy they are to use, a great fit in your hand and plenty of grip to make your inputs feel satisfying. I suspect they might soak up a little of the high frequency feedback from the Simucube 2 – they have a perfect amount of compression when you squeeze them and might be acting as dampers in some way. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the molded grips as Cube Controls refer to this part of the product as their proprietary technology!
It’s also nice to have a change from Alcantara.
The buttons have a nice, high quality feel to them and they’re easy to find thanks to the “VR friendly” surrounds that each button is sunk into. As I’m mostly a driver that prefers VR these little surrounds are great because I could find the button I needed far more quickly while using the wheel with my Valve Index headset.
I used the encoders on the front quite heavily for brake bias and paging on the wheel display in my Dallara F3 in iRacing. I mapped various buttons for entering / exiting the car, pit lane speed limiter, re-centering the VR view and more.
I like the allocation of 13 buttons and 3 encoders. For me, that’s plenty enough as anything more complex is wasted on me unless I’m using my triple monitors. This wheel just seems to offer a perfect amount of complexity to be useful without overloading you.
Mounting with the Cube Controls Universal Hub
The Formula Sport is compatible with sim racing wheelbases from Thrustmaster and Logitech (both with an adapter pictured below), AccuForce, Fanatec and naturally, SimuCube’s 1 and 2 series wheelbases via the Universal Hub mount (pictured in red below).
I mounted the wheel on the SQR hub provided with the Simucube. Here are the component parts and a view of Cube’s Universal Hub mount:
The universal hub is a CNC machined and anodized part that allows cross compatibility with just about any sim racing hub. It comes already fitted to the back of the wheel and has a 70mm PCD on the outer ring and 50.8mm PCD on the inner so you can mount one of these wheels on HRS hubs / Fanatec’s Podium Hub / QR hubs from SRM, the Tomy Tacing QR TRX and so on.
For this test, I’m mounting the wheel to the Simucube 2 Pro using their excellent SQR hub.
I like this hub a lot because there’s no flex and absolutely no movement (play) in it whatsoever. Once it’s assembled and attached, provided you put it together well, you’ll have no problems at all.
The issue with this hub is just to be sure you’re tightening the bolts properly before final assembly as accessing the bolts pictured below means you’re taking the hub apart again.
Fitted to the back of the wheel, the SQR hub looks the part:
While we’re looking at the back of the wheel you’ll notice a few features. The magnetic paddle shifters use 4mm thick carbon (compared to Fanatec’s 2mm think paddles on their advanced paddle module). This gives the paddles a really strong, certain feel.
Mounted on the aluminum machined rear casing is an on/off switch (on the left) and a tiny wireless aerial (right). Be sure to charge the battery by using the provided USB cable (mine came charged):
When you power the wheel, a little green light flashes on a button on the right hand side of the wheel:
This is the wireless feature announcing itself to the wheelbase. As we covered in the Simucube 2 review, the wheel announces itself to pair with the wheelbase, and the device will appear in the TrueDrive software.
The drive / conclusion
Once mounted, I used this wheel for around 5 days on the Simucube 2 Pro. It’s a really professional and well thought out piece of kit.
Having been used to the Fanatec system, working with Cube Controls wheels have been quite an awakening for me. This is such a well made racing wheel. To refer to it as “entry level” isn’t appropriate, it’s Cube’s least expensive wheel but comes with a lot of the features and the build quality of their higher end equipment.
The wireless system worked without a single issue and I honestly can’t think of any problems, except perhaps I wished there was an option for a longer USB cable if you need to mount this wheel on something like a Fanatec DD2.
A highly refined, top quality sim racing wheel for VR users and eSports professionals alike. I want to keep this one!
