Real car electronics, running in your sim rig

In use Revs in the middle, on a real needle, where this marque has always put them. Speed, boost, oil pressure and coolant move with the car you are driving.

The screen beside them is a second panel. Voltage, boost, coolant, oil pressure, tyre pressures. Step through the pages on the column knob mid-stint, the same way you would in the car.

Backlight is on with the ignition and off without. This generation never had a dimmer, so there is nothing to set.

Where a road car keeps its odometer, this one shows the service page. Nothing here reads a mileage and nothing writes one.

In use Out of the box the lever sends its movements and your game keeps its own gearbox. Nudge it forward for a downshift, back for an upshift, knock it across into the manual gate. The panel shows whatever the game did with them, so the letter on the dash is the game's answer rather than the lever's.

For a game with no gear lever modelled in it, the device keeps the gearbox instead. The lever picks Park, Reverse, Neutral and Drive and counts its own gears in the manual gate. Each position arrives as its own button, thirteen in all. Nothing on the PC has to understand a lever. It sees buttons.

Binding is one gesture either way. Hold the P button for five seconds and the rig wakes up, the gear readout blinks to say it has, and every position you push offers itself to the game's binding dialog in turn. Press P again when you are done.

One point is worth knowing before use. Push the lever all the way and you get a single press for where it ended up, never the notch it passed through. Hold it at the first notch instead and that is what you get, a quarter of a second in, held for as long as you keep it there. Both notches are real positions, and the lever tells them apart so the game does not have to.

Switch the ignition off in the game and it winds itself back to Park under its own motor, the same as it does in the car.

And when no game is running it stops being a gear lever and starts scrolling. One notch is a line, two is a whole page, in whichever direction you pushed. A spring-centred lever with two travels in each direction makes a better scroll control than most things on a desk. Between sessions it reads a results screen or a leaderboard. The moment telemetry arrives it is a gear lever again, so a shift during a race cannot page the screen.

In use It sorts itself out. Turn it and the volume moves. Press it to play or pause. Rock it left and right to skip tracks. Nothing to set up and nothing to bind. The labels on the buttons are what they do.

Fit a dashboard with menus of its own and it takes what it needs first, so the knob walks that panel the way it did in the car. Whatever the panel does not use stays music, and whatever is left after that is a plain button your game can bind. Every control on the knob lands somewhere.

The same knob therefore behaves differently on two different rigs. The app reports how yours came out, one line per job, naming the part that took it.

Press RADIO and the whole unit becomes a controller. Every button reaches the game, and the rocker and the turn arrive together as a d-pad. That is the mode for a binding dialog, where each control has to reach the title. Hold MEDIA for two seconds to come back. A short push in and a long push out, so returning mid-corner never costs a hold.

The touch pad on top works in both modes and clicks by itself. One finger taps left, two taps right, and two dragged together scroll.

In use The part that makes the rest of the rig disappear. Everything for music sits under the right thumb. Volume on the rocker, tracks on the two arrows, play on the scroll wheel pressed in. None of it needs a hand off the rim, which is why the buttons are there in the car.

Fit a dashboard as well and the wheel drives its menus from the same buttons that did it in the car. The scroll wheel walks the list, the press enters, the board-computer button opens it. Whatever that panel does not use stays with music, and anything left over is a plain button the game can bind.

The cruise row is left alone deliberately. Five buttons, untouched, straight through to the game. They are the only controls on the rig whose original meaning already has an equivalent in a racing title. A pit limiter bound to LIMIT takes five seconds and is immediately right.

The rocker beside them scrolls, but only when nothing is driving the rig. A light push is a line, a firm one a page. Between sessions it reads a results screen. Once a game starts sending telemetry it is an ordinary button again, so it cannot page the screen mid-race.

Its backlight follows the car. The same dimmer the dashboard listens to reaches the wheel, so at night the two match rather than one of them sitting bright next to the other.