GT Omega Racing Seat

I get a lot of stuff delivered. Sarah and I buy a lot of stuff online and it’s a rare week where there’s not a delivery truck parked outside with a parcel or package for either of us. But I don’t think I’ve been as excited as I was when I got the email through saying that the GT Omega Racing seat was arriving by UPS the next day.

The two big brown boxes arrived and I set about assembling the steelwork. The instructions on the website were straightforward and all of the tools needed were provided in the box. I got the system including the speaker stands at the back and the monitor stand and console shelf at the front and after about half an hour I had put all of the pieces together and mounted the red and black leather seat onto the frame. I’d picked a median setting for the adjustable position for the wheel based on my 6′ 2″ frame and sitting down for the first time I only had to move the seat back a little on the sliders and it felt perfect. As a note there are additional optional add-ons for the seat including a keyboard tray and mounts for gear shifts. I’d also say these are perfect for joystick/controller locations or, for the PC gamers, keyboard and stick/mouse options for shooters or WoW.

I (currently) use the Microsoft Force Feedback wheel and GTO Omega Racing supplied the optional bracketry to allow me to secure this to the chassis too as there are no screw points such as you’d find on the Fanatec or Logitech wheels. The bolts for these wheels are included as standard in the kit so when I do get my Fanatec CSR wheel at some point it’ll be a straightforward matter of switching them over.

So the build was done, the wheel was fitted – actually I want to mention the pedal set here, this was the only area where I may have to apply a little garage-tech and employ the use of a pair of sturdy zip-ties. There is a lip at the bottom of the pedal base of the race seat and the pedal set does sit nicely against this with little or no movement, however I found it just a little too close for my long pins and sliding it up and back fits well. There are two slots revealed in this position, used to secure the other pedal decks, which I’m going to use to zip-tie the MS pedals in place. Anyway, the build was complete and I needed to see how it worked in anger so I booted up Forza 4 and got to work. Actually I didn’t. I may have mentioned my setup in previous posts, but basically I work at home and my consoles live in my office with the Xbox 360, PS3 and a Mac Mini sharing a 24″ display on my desk alongside my work machine. When I was clamping the wheel to my desk this positioning was fine, but using the seat I’m now about a foot further away from the screen and some eight inches lower, the solution was to move my screen down onto the desk of course and this is unique to me (I’m assuming) but the shift in position is something worth bearing in mind. Of course if you are a hardcore racer it’s no hardship to mount your screen onto the supplied stand, drop the console onto the shelf and bingo, you’ve got a self contained unit for joy-making (that sounds a little wrong but I’m sure you get my drift).

GET ON WITH IT!!

OK, sorry, here we go. The position of the wheel and pedals felt very, very natural to me and after a couple of micro adjustments to the seat back angle I was able to blat through a bunch of races with ease and in extreme comfort. The GT Omega race seat is without doubt the most immersive piece of game-related hardware I’ve got. You can forget specialist controllers etc., being in a race seat with the wheel and pedals in the right places makes racing much more ‘real’.

Did this make me a better racer? Well, no, I can’t claim that, having a race seat doesn’t endow you with a +5 skill attribute or anything but it does let you concentrate on what you’re doing in both comfort and in an environment which promotes focus on the job in hand and perhaps that is worth a few tenths of a second per lap.

At some four feet long and eighteen inches wide, this is a substantial piece of kit and not one your other half (or parents) will necessarily want to have in the living room, unless they are rabid racing game fans of course, but if you’re are happy to drop £200 on a Fanatec wheel then you’re probably going to be able to find a way to make the GT Omega seat fit somewhere. And that’s something you should do too because this is a stonking bit of kit!

I’m going to have to find a couple of things to point at for improvement – just to be balanced – but to be honest they are things which I’ll be able to fix through adjusting the seat and wheel positions as I got a slight lumbar niggle after an hour (or so) of driving. So tweaks and 2 zip-ties are going to equal perfection. You can’t ask for more than that really.

The bottom line? If you are committed enough to driving/racing games to consider a Fanatec wheel (or a Thrustmaster T500RS if you’re a PC user) then you should also consider a GT Omega Racing seat. With the add-ons it becomes the centre of your gaming world, going beyond just driving and including WoW, shooters, RPG whatever, all in comfort and with focus. Make space and get one.