MOZA Racing R3 Racing Wheel and Pedals for Xbox Review

If you’re serious about your racing games, then you will probably be serious about the kit you use to play them. And whilst a standard controller is absolutely fine, and the Thrustmaster eSwap XR Pro Controller Forza Horizon 5 Edition comes with a teeny tiny steering wheel, for the most part you will want some hardcore kit – a proper steering wheel, some pedals, and more. 

It’s with that in which MOZA Racing have you covered, with a variety of different bits of gear, mostly for those racing on PC. But with the R3 Racing Wheel and Pedals for Xbox, they’ve made a stunning entry into the console market. This is a seriously impressive piece of kit. 

We’re more than familiar with the racing world. In fact, we’d go as far to say that it’s been our go-to genre for the best part of four decades of gaming, having played pretty much every racer to have graced the consolelands. And for the last couple of years, we’ve done that with a racing wheel to hand, shaving seconds off lap times, getting totally immersed with some kit from Thrustmaster; the T248 Wheel and T128 Wheel. 

But, and we’ll say it now, the MOZA Racing R3 is on another level to anything we’ve used previously. In fact, it’s brilliant. Like, really brilliant. Consider this as MOZA’s entry level, console debut, and the future looks stupidly bright for those looking to race on Xbox. But it does come with a little (big) caveat. 

So what do you get in the MOZA Racing R3 Racing Wheel and Pedal set? Well, shock horror, you get an extremely impressive racing wheel, and you get some pedals chucked in for good measure. But we guess we should go into a little more detail… 

Included in the R3 Bundle is an ES Steering Wheel that is nothing short of stunning. Feeling great in hand, hefty, solid and well designed, we’ve spent hours with this, mostly as we’ve taken to Forza Motorsport and DiRT Rally 2.0. A textured and grippy wheel, every single button you would associate with the Xbox world is front and centre here, with a few little additions dropped in to complement. In fact, there are 22 buttons included on this one. 

There’s a massive Xbox Nexus button within easy reach no matter how you hold the wheel, accompanied by slightly smaller than the norm face buttons. The trifecta of Home, Menu and View are flanked by that of a Share button, whilst a soft-touch D-Pad has not missed a single beat. Obviously, this is a steering wheel, and as such there are no thumbsticks included; that would just be weird. 

What’s not weird is the movement of the usual triggers and bumpers. The triggers have been shifted out and onto push buttons, accompanied by additional S1, S2, LSB and RSB buttons. The bumpers move around to highly tactile, clickable shifters on the back of the wheel. Again, these feel nothing short of outstanding in use, allowing for quick and easy gear shifting or the like. They feel great to pull on as you’re caning it down a straight in any number of F1 games, working the gears like no tomorrow. 

From there is an oversized ‘Radio’ button (remember, this is all about getting you as immersed as you possibly can be with your racing experience), N and P buttons. The thing is, whilst there are a number of buttons front and centre of the MOZA R3 wheel, each and every one of them are well within pushing distance, ensuring that you’ll rarely need to take your focus off of the race ahead. Granted, those with slightly smaller hands may need to shift around a bit, but we’ve found this wheel to prove to be highly accessible and usable. The only slight downside is when we’ve been searching around for the DRS button in F1 22 (the Y button), occasionally hitting something incompatible. 

The wheel attaches via an easy-to-use quick release system onto a direct drive unit, which itself gets clamped to the desk or rig you are using. We’ve had this attached to our EZ Desk Carbon Edition for the last few weeks, appreciating the opportunity to remove the wheel with ease, leaving clamp and direct drive in place. With a few simple cable attachments, you’ll find yourself pretty much up and ready to roll within just a few minutes. And that quick release system is pretty great, with a pull on the MOZA liveried wheel ring all that is needed to disconnect the wheel from the base, storing it away if required. 

It is however the direct drive base that is key to everything that powers the MOZA R3. Full of inputs, outputs and ports, it’s here where you find opportunities to cable it up to power, the wheel itself and your Xbox console (or PC if you prefer). You’ll also be able to connect the wheel and base to a pedal set – the SR-P Lite system included in the R3 bundle for instance – or a digital dash, shifters, handbrake or more. 

That pedal set is equally good. Created from high strength steel, this is a marked improvement over previous pedal sets that we’ve used, super solid and highly tactile in the foot. It comes with a throttle and brake attached, but MOZA do also deal with an additional clutch pedal that can be slotted in. Better yet, the pedals can be moved, spaced to suit your needs. With some serious amounts of anti-slip pads situated on the underside and hall sensors included inside, these are easily the best we’ve used. 

And then there is also the MOZA App that is available if you really must tune things in even more. Frankly, we’ve had such a good time utilising this straight out of the box, that the initial default set-up has proven to be fine. 

So far we’ve not really dipped into the buzzwords and features that the MOZA R3 utilises. Mostly that is due to personal preference, long gone caring for such. If you’ve read any of our words before, you’ll know that we don’t worry about 4K too much, nor 60FPS over 30FPS, Ray-Tracing or any of that. And similarly we won’t get too hyped about the MOZA R3 with its 3.9 Nm DD Servo Motor, nor the innovative X Shape design of the drive housing, the ultra-low torque ripple and groove torque, intelligent temperature control system or the aviation-grade aluminium in which the base has been crafted. That’s not to say it’s not important, and it may well be to you, especially if you take your gaming – and your racing – super seriously, but for us, much more important is the fact that the R3 feels, looks and plays good. It ticks those three boxes with aplomb. 

It ticks them so well in fact that even though we’ve been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to use a good amount of gaming gear over the years, from chairs to beanbags, from headsets to controllers, to battery packs and – of course – steering wheels, we can happily sit here and proclaim that the MOZA Racing R3 is right up there in and amongst the very finest bits of Xbox gaming kit we’ve laid hands on. 

But, and this is a big but. Part of the reason we play on console the vast majority of the time, as opposed to firing up a Windows PC, is that we know, pretty much without fail, that picking up a controller, firing up the Xbox and loading up our favourite game will work without issues. We’re too long in the tooth to be done with concerning ourselves with drivers, about compatibility and the like. And so it is disappointing to see that the MOZA R3 is pretty limited in terms of the games that it is useful for – at least on Xbox, officially licensed or not. F1 2024, the latest and greatest from the Codemasters racing kings fails to register input, although you can happily play stuff from F1 22 and earlier without problems. The thing is, we’re here to play F1 with the most up-to-date roster, the fanciest features. 

We’ve also had a great time hooning it around with DiRT Rally 2.0, but that’s a game that is now years old, and have found problems with the MOZA R3 working with a personal favourite – The Crew Motorfest; listed as a working title, we can’t even get through the menus with the R3 in tow. In fact, loading that game up instantly switches the R3 from its usual Xbox console ‘mode’ into that of PC. Strange. 

Anyways, you can see where we are going with this one. By all means, if your game is supported, the MOZA R3 is a stunner. But you may find that not to be the case, and as console players, that’s a worry. Is that the fault of MOZA? Of Microsoft? Of the Xbox eco-system? Or as gaming as a whole? We’ll leave that up to you to decide.

Simple to set-up, feeling great in hand – and on foot – if you have any liking to the racing scene and love nothing more than getting behind the wheel on Xbox (or PC), then we’d not hesitate to push you in the direction of the MOZA Racing R3. Hell, we’d even happily have a conversation about upgrading previous wheels and pedals to this one. At least we would as long as we could include certain games as the caveat. 

A great new entry into the Xbox racing scene? Without a shadow of doubt – as long as the MOZA R3 Racing Wheel and Pedals is compatible with your games of choice. 

Huge thanks go out to MOZA for providing us with the R3 Racing Wheel and Pedals for review. Hit them up direct if you want to get involved for yourself. It may not be cheap at some £399, but you most certainly get what you pay for.