Posted  by 

Best Racing Wheel Games For Mac

Best Racing Wheel Games For Mac Average ratng: 4,1/5 7220 reviews

What are the best racing games on PC? Whether mastering muddy tracks in Dirt Rally or embracing Forza Horizon 4’s brilliant Britain, here are the best racers around.

Mar 02, 2018  After testing 20+ games, these are the best racing games for Mac today. Our Top 10 has something for everyone, including arcade racing games, simulations, kart games and even a few free racing games for mac. The best racing wheel that provides different options for gamers wanting the most flexibility. Dual-motor force feedback is completely adjustable to match the user's preference. Comes with both paddle shifters and a stick shifter. For those who love racing-centric video games, a racing wheel is a must-have. This gaming accessory.

Jun 15, 2017  OS X Racing Games, Wheels and Wheel Upgrades for Mac Racing Fanatics 1. F1 2012 and 2013. Dirt 2 and 3. Virtual Grand Prix 3. Grid 1 and 2. Auto Sport Driving. MINNEER Racing Wheel Stand Pro Compatible with Logitech G25, G27, G29, G920 Racing Simulator Steering Wheel Stand, Foldable & Tilt-Adjustable，Wheel and Pedals Not Included Minneer 3.1 out of 5 stars 6.

Picking the very best racing games on PC is no easy task. So many elements contribute: the genre’s not only about graphical fidelity and hair-raising sound design – though both certainly help – it’s also about pulling you into the action as if you’re there in the driver’s seat, eyes strained as the asphalt whips past at 240kph. From honing your timing for a perfect gear shift to kicking out the back-end for a sublime drift, a quality racing game just feels right.

Don’t go asking, “How could you forget about Grand Prix Legends! Where’s Geoff Crammond?!” When versions of those games surface on Steam or GOG, we’ll be the first in line to play them again… and inevitably find they haven’t aged as well as we hoped. So for those of you who are just looking to hop in and fire up the engine of a superb racer, whether that’s an intricate sim or an arcade thriller, we’ve got some breakneck PC racers for you.

The best racing games are:

Games

Forza Horizon 4

Playground Games’s latest racing title has left the Aussie Outback for the British Isles in Forza Horizon 4. Forza’s ten-hour campaign has you race through the Scottish Highlands, coast around the Lake District, and drive through quaint British villages.

As the seasons change between spring, summer, autumn, and winter, so do the landscapes. You’ll have to adapt your driving to suit each season, you can feel your car react to subtle changes like wet leaves and icy roads making you more aware of the terrain and forcing you to skillfully master it if you want to record the best track times. If you need any help getting started, just read our Forza Horizon 4 beginner’s guide.

You can take part in traditional races, seasonal championships, co-op campaigns, stunt jumps, and endurance tests in a variety of speedy and stylish vehicles ranging from modified transit vans to one-off hypercars. Coast around the British countryside and get your hands on classic cars, and yes, there’s a James Bond Car pack that gives you a choice of iconic Aston Martins. As you’ll find in our Forza Horizon 4 PC review is quite the road trip.

Dirt Rally 2

If you don’t know your pacenotes from your driveshaft, Dirty Rally 2.0 is not the racing game for you. If you’re looking for a casual driving experience, just getting from A to B a bit faster than you would normally be able to on your daily commute, try Dirt 4, instead. In Rally 2.0 your co-driver will launch instructions, numbers, and directions at you thick and fast and, if you can’t handle the varied terrains and hairpin bends then you’ll be smashing into a tree before you know it.

As you’ll find in our Dirt Rally 2.0 PC review, is unapologetic in its hardcore sensibilities. Unlike more casual racing games, failure here is regular, and the slightest error will be ruthlessly punished. Heavy crashes overwhelm the senses like a flashbang has exploded on your bonnet. And, if you’re caught behind the pack, the introduction of surface degradation will make even driving in a straight line a struggle. But, if you know what you’re doing, there are few better approximations of this demanding discipline among the best PC games than Dirt Rally 2.0.

Just as we did in our Dirt Rally 2.0 impressions, you’ll be doing a lot of crashing: Codemasters’ driving game doesn’t come with a tutorial this time – you’ll only learn from successive trips to the hospital. Also failing to make the drive from previous games is the procedural track-generating system, Your Stage. Instead, each race is meticulously hand-crafted, inviting devoted fans to commit every nefarious twist and turn to memory. That’s the only way to master Dirt Rally 2.0 and, if you don’t embrace its obsessively singular vision, you’re finishing last.

Shift 2

Shift 2 might be the best compromise between realism and accessibility of any game on this list. It’s not just the ways the car handle – menacing, but capable – but the way it consistently thinks about what players need to perform at a high level. Rather than lock your view gazing out over the hood, or ask you to spring for TrackIR to let you turn your head, Shift 2 has a dynamic view that subtly changes based on context.

Coming up on a gentle right-hand corner, your view shifts a bit as your driver avatar looks right into the apex. For a sharper corner, your view swings a bit more so you have a sense of what you’re driving into, yet it doesn’t feel disorienting at all. It feels natural.

Read more: Here are the best management games on PC

The thoughtfulness even extends to depth-of-field. This is a wildly overused visual effect but Shift 2 uses it to highlight where your attention should be. When someone is coming up fast on your tail, objects farther away get a bit fuzzier while your mirrors sharpen to razor clarity. As you move around in dense traffic, your cockpit gets indistinct while the cars around you come into focus. It sounds gimmicky, but it all feels as natural as driving a car in real life. Shift 2 is really dedicated to communicating the fun and accomplishment of performance driving, and it succeeds admirably.

Project Cars 2

Real cars, you might have noticed, rarely cartwheel into the verge the moment you dare to mix steering and acceleration inputs. In fact, they’re quite good at going round corners – it is almost like an engineer has given the problem some thought during the design process. Performance cars in Project Cars 2, while certainly more liable to bite back, are even better at the whole turning thing. Throw a Ferrari or Lamborghini around the track (as we have done on a number of occasions) and you’ll probably spend more time having fun than fretting about the absence of a rewind button in real life.

Slightly Mad know this. They are, it seems, just as frustrated by the driving sim genre’s propensity to equate challenge with the sensation of driving on treadless tires on a slab of melting ice set at an angle of 45 degrees. So here, cars actually go around the corners, even when you give the throttle some beans. Don’t get us wrong, this is no virtual Scallextric set – you can still make mistakes, and traction is far from absolute. But, crucially, you aren’t punished for these mistakes with a rapid trip into the nearest trackside barrier (at least, if you play with a wheel – pad control is still a little oversensitive). The result is a game that feels much more like real driving, and as you’ll read about in our Project Cars 2 PC review, it is wonderful.

The studio has made plenty of other changes in this sequel too, shoring up the car selection with a greater variety of vehicles, and creating a career mode that feels less wayward without sacrificing the appealing freedom of choice pioneered by the previous game’s. There’s even half-decent AI to race against if you don’t fancy the cut and thrust of online play. But the most spectacular update is the game’s astonishing weather system, one that calculates a dizzying number of factors about the physical properties of materials and surfaces, water pooling and run-off, in order to spit out the best set of weather effects – and wet weather driving – we’ve ever experienced in a racing game. A rather successful sequel, then, and better yet the developers are working on a Fast & Furious game.

TrackMania 2: Canyon

Any genre veteran will tell you that good track design is an essential part of any quality racing title. And that’s an area where TrackMania 2: Canyon really has a winning, unique selling point. While in most games a hairpin bend, g-force-laden camber, or high-speed straight might suffice, tracks in TrackMania 2: Canyon take on a terrifying, Hot Wheels-inspired new meaning. Sweeping barrel-rolls, nigh-impossible jumps, and floating platforms that stick up two fingers to physics are what set the TrackMania series apart from other arcade racers.

The real heart of TrackMania 2 can be found online, where the ingenious, convoluted creations of others take centre stage. The competition is fierce and frantic. A race can quickly devolve into a hilarious highlight reel of missed jumps and unforeseen corners. The racing mechanics make for an ideal pick-up-and-play multiplayer game that you can lose hours to without noticing. That’s largely because of how easy the cars are to drive, and yet, once you hit the (often ludicrous) tracks, it’s anyone’s bet who’ll take first place.

Driver: San Francisco

Every arcade racer should be as cool as this game. If Steve McQueen were digitised and turned into a videogame, he would be Driver: San Francisco.

While Driver: SF features cars and influences from a variety of eras, it approaches everything with a ’70s style. It loves American muscle, roaring engines, squealing tyres, and the impossibly steep hills and twisting roads of San Francisco. It may have the single greatest soundtrack of any racing game, and some of the best event variety, too.

It also has one of the most novel conceits in the genre. Rather than be bound to one vehicle, you can freely swap your car for any other on the road at the push of a button. So, in many races, the car you finish in might not be the one you started with, and in-car chases, you’ll quickly learn to teleport through traffic to engineer a variety of automotive catastrophes just to screw with opponents. It’s bizarre, original, and perpetually delightful. As we’ve said in the past, there’s a lot modern racers could learn from Driver: San Francisco. They really don’t make ’em like this anymore.

F1 2019

It might not be the revolution we got in 2016, but this is undoubtedly the best F1 game you can play. It’s a moderate update on last year’s effort, but this is a racing game where you’ll spot more changes off the track than on it. As was widely praised in the glowing F1 2019 review scores, the series’ AI continues to be uncannily realistic, retaining the steep challenge if you don’t fancy the more arcade-like experience posed by the game’s myriad driving aides.

But, it’s away from the overbearing heat of the track that this simulation game really shines. The solo missions that serve as a precursor to your ascent to the big leagues are a detailed, story-focused kick start into the world of Formula 1 but, even though it fizzles out into a more traditional ten-season campaign, it’s still a nice touch. Not only is F1 2019 the best of its kind, Codemasters has also recognised the vibrancy of its esports scene and put it to the forefront of it multiplayer offering. It looks like we may be waiting to hear about the F1 2020 release date for some time now, so it’s a bless that the most recent version of the series is so good.

Race: Injection

You can’t put together a list of great simulation racing games without having something from SimBin. While the studio appears to have lost its way a bit with the dubious free-to-play RaceRoom Racing Experience, SimBin were sim racing royalty during the mid-2000s. Race: Injection is their capstone game, the package that combines just about everything they accomplished with the GTR series and Race 07.

These are hard games, but the race-modified sedans of the World Touring Car Cup should ease your transition into serious racing. Even a racing Honda Accord is still a Honda Accord, and the slightly more manageable speed and difficulty of the WTCC is a great place to learn the tracks and SimBin’s superb physics.

But there are muscle cars, endurance cars, and open-wheel racers to choose from in this package, all of them brilliantly recreated and offering unique driving challenges. For the money, you probably can’t do better than Race: Injection for sim racing.

Keeping it classic: Check out the best old games on PC

Unfortunately, the Race series was also long in the tooth even as Injection was released, and there’s no concealing the old tech it’s built on. Don’t let the flat lighting and dull graphics throw you off, though. A few minutes with these cars, especially if you have a quality force feedback wheel, and you won’t even notice the aged appearance.

Assetto Corsa Competizione

This racing sim will appeal to dedicated fans of the genre while also outdoing the original Assetto Corsa in practically every department – and doing that means clearing a very high bar indeed. It’s taken a while for Competizione to work through the turmoil of Early Access, but with it’s 1.0 release there are only a few bugs left to crush.

We’re quite taken with it, too. In our Assetto Corsa Competizione review, Phil Iwaniuk highlights how it evolves from its predecessor. “There’s more than just an endurance racing licence to distinguish Assetto Corsa Competizione from its predecessor,” he says. “It’s more polished, more precise, and offers more scope for long-term single-player satisfaction.”

iRacing

Welp, here we go. The Grand Poobah of simulation racing. iRacing blurs the line between play and work. Its cars and tracks are recreated with a fanatical attention to detail, and its league racing rules are about as serious as you’ll find in any racing club or at any track event in the world. This is a racing game for people who want the real thing and are willing to spend hours training for it. It is perhaps the pinnacle of Papyrus legend David Kaemmer’s career. For those of us who cut our teeth on the IndyCar and Grand Prix Legends game, that name alone is recommendation enough.

iRacing is not cheap – though, at $50 a year, it’s better value than many an MMO – also, you should check out the best MMOs on PC. Nor is its emphasis on graphics. But its rewards are aimed at a specific and demanding group of players. When you’ve outgrown the Codemasters games, and even stuff like Race: Injection is wearing a little thin, this is where you go. Also, iRacing in VR is quite the experience, too.

There you have it, the best racing games on PC. If all this speedster action has gotten you restless and impatient, why not double down on those feelings by checking up on the best upcoming PC games. Perhaps you’d like to slow things down, and focus on more cerebral pursuits? In which case, read about the best strategy games on PC.

Read more: There’s plenty more vehicular mayhem in our list of the best police games on PC

In the meantime, get fired into the speedy sensations above. Turns out, virtual driving is way more exciting than trying to parallel park a second-hand Skoda. Who knew?

BestRacing Wheels for Xbox OneWindows Central2020

When it comes to console racing, the Xbox One spoils its owners with the best titles around. Whether you're a Forza fan or prefer Project Cars 2 or F1 2019, Xbox is the place to be for racing on the console. If you're getting serious about your virtual racing, you'll be interested in moving away from a controller and up to a wheel like the superb Logitech G920.

Best Overall - Logitech G920

The Logitech G920 is, on balance, the best of the bunch. And part of that is based on its longevity; you can often find it at a handsome discount. But it's not good only because of its price. Logitech doesn't churn out new wheels that often, but when they come, they're excellent.

The G920 is a well-built wheel with all the creature comforts you need to go racing. That includes a built-in vibration motor that provides accurate force feedback to feel the surface you're driving on, a 900-degree rotation, a leather grip, and a full three-pedal setup.

This means you can use the optional gearshift with it if you prefer, though it is an additional purchase. For most, though, the metal paddle shifters will be plenty. It's also worth highlighting the location of the console buttons because they're placed perfectly for easy access without the need to take your hands off the wheel. Comfort, performance, the G920 has it all.

Pros

  • Excellent design and construction
  • Attractive price
  • Three-pedal setup
  • Great force feedback

Best Overall

Logitech G920

On balance, an excellent wheel for all

The Logitech G920 is well made, well priced, and performs to such a high standard any virtual racer will be happy with it.

Source: Windows Central

If you're searching for the ultimate racing wheel to go with your Xbox One, this is it. Thrustmaster's epic TS-XW is pricey, but it's the closest thing you'll get to reality without having to put a helmet on.

A big part of what makes it so good is the partnership with Sparco, which makes the TS-XW's rim an actual recreation of a real-life racing wheel, the P310, right down to the authentic Alcantara trim.

The force feedback on this wheel is incredible, paired with a dual belt-pulley system and metal ball-bearing axle and 1080 degrees of rotation for the ultimate in realism. The companion three-pedal setup also allows for an optional stick shift. Perhaps the only thing you might not like is that this thing is massive!

Pros

  • Excellent design and construction
  • Modeled on a real-life wheel
  • Three-pedal setup
  • Incredible accuracy from force feedback

Best for Serious Racers

Thrustmaster TS-XW

As close to real as you can get

What's more, you can play offline for free, for as long as you want.But the real meat of this game is in online play, which does incur a monthly fee to continue to play. Take to the skies behind the yoke of dozens of legendary World War II-era aircraft. Apple mac computers. Single player mode consists of 20 training modules, 12 instant missions, and five different Free Flight modes.

This wheel from Thrustmaster is as close as you can get to the real thing without having to go outside and put a helmet on.

Games

Source: Thrustmaster

Thrustmaster doesn't just cater to the super-serious sim racers out there, the company has a whole range of different wheels, and the TMX is particularly useful for those making their first steps.

The TMX retains features you'd find on more expensive wheels, such as a 900-degree rotation, leather trim, and paddle shifts, but cuts back in areas such as the pedals being plastic, not metal to help keep the cost down, as well as there only being two so it doesn't go with a stick shift. But even then, the pedals are still adjustable, the paddles are strong, and the force feedback is excellent.

The TMX is a comfortable wheel to use. It's also a high-quality product designed to appeal to the newer sim-racers or those on a tighter budget. But neither of those things means you should miss out on features, and that's why it's such a good wheel for beginners. You're not missing out on much at all.

Pros

  • 900-degree rotation
  • Great force feedback
  • Leather trim
  • Solid build quality

Racing Game For Mac

Best for Beginners

Thrustmaster TMX

A great first step

An excellent wheel for beginners or those on tighter budgets that still delivers on features and experience.

Source: Hori

Not everyone is hunting for super-realism and the price that goes with it. If you're searching for something budget that'll still give you a bit more immersion in your racing, the officially licensed Hori Racing Wheel Overdrive isn't a bad choice.

Rotation is limited to just 270-degrees, but for most racing games, that's just about enough. It's got a beautiful design, a grippy rubber trim, and a bonus touch, an adjustable dead zone on the top of the wheel.

The pedals are also excellent. While there are only two, so no stick shifting, they have a retractable footrest for added comfort as well as being full-sized. The pedals are also fully adjustable, so you've still got control over how the setup feels when you're on the virtual track.

Pros

  • Fantastic price
  • Licensed by Microsoft
  • Grippy rubber trim
  • Solid build quality

Cons

  • Only two-pedal setup
  • Rotation limited to 270-degrees

Best Budget

Hori Racing Wheel Overdrive

A super-affordable way to get into using a wheel

An incredibly affordable way to have a more immersive and enjoyable experience in your Xbox One racing games.

Source: Thrustmaster

The Thrustmaster TX is a brilliant wheel, but not just because of what you get in the box. What you get is excellent, with a leather finished wheel, the T3PA pedals, and compatibility with both Xbox One and PC, but the true beauty of the TX is what you can do with it.

Thanks to being powered by the TX Servo Base, you're able to swap the wheel you get included for several other wheel designs that Thrustmaster has in its ecosystem. If you're a big F1 2019 player, for example, you might find yourself drawn to the Ferrari F1 style wheel.

The TX Servo Base itself provides excellent force feedback and a full 900-degree rotation with brushless motors for added longevity. Additionally, you also have the opportunity to pair it with Thrustmaster's latest pedals, the Sparco handbrake mod, and the company's own stick shift to create the custom setup of your dreams.

Pros

  • Excellent design and construction
  • Swappable wheels
  • Three-pedal setup
  • Fantastic accuracy from force feedback

Best for Customization

Thrustmaster TX

Build the rig of your dreams with this wheel

High performance is matched with swappable wheels and support for a host of accessories to really make your setup your own.

Racing best on Xbox One

The Xbox One has a great selection of top racing titles for fans of console racing. There is also some equally excellent hardware to go with them if you want to get serious. For most, the Logitech G920 will be a perfect wheel.

It's well designed and beautifully made, well priced, and comes with a full three-pedal setup to use with the optional stick shift. Beginners and more experienced racers alike will appreciate this wheel. Logitech has a history of making great wheels, and the G920 is just the latest in that lineup, and you can also use it with a PC.

It's not the cheapest wheel you can get, but it's also far from the most expensive, while still packing the sort of force feedback and build quality you'd expect from something that costs much more. It's a wheel with middle of the road pricing, but performance that even the most serious sim racers will appreciate.

Best Racing Wheel Games For Mac Free

Credits — The team that worked on this guide

Richard Devine is an Editor at Windows Central. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently you'll find him covering all manner of PC hardware and gaming,

We may earn a commission for purchases using our links. Learn more.

Free Racing Games For Mac

Cut price racing

Best Racing Wheel Games For Mac 2017

How to go sim racing on your Xbox without breaking the bank

Best Free Racing Games For Pc

Want to take your Xbox One racing experience up a notch (or two) without spending your life savings? Here's how to build a good racing rig on a tighter budget.