Anyone who has ever sim raced or has wanted to get into sim racing understands how difficult it can be to find the right Sim Racing Components. Hundreds of brands, thousands of components, and a million reviews. It can be very overwhelming, even for those who follow the Sim Industry closely.
If only there was a platform that made it easier to filter through all the components, compare parts, find reviews, and browse through other Sim Rigs. Well – I got news for you!
Overview of Ready Set Sim – a website to build your racing sim
Ready Set Sim came around a little under a year ago, and I’ve been keeping my eye on them. Their first product was a questionnaire that asked the user their preferences and presented them with a sim rig configuration. More recently, though, they’ve launched (and greatly improved) their key product: the racing sim builder.
The Sim Rig Builder is essentially a PC Parts picker, or New Egg, for Sim Racing Equipment. RSS has 12 product categories to choose from (wheels, pedals, chassis, pedals, seat, shifter…) to allow you to design your dream rig. Also important to note that the tool is free to use.
What can you get here? Feature breakdown of the Sim Rig Builder:
Key features of their Sim Rig Builder include:
- Filtering capabilities (price, gaming platform, racing type, and component-specific filtering)
- Compare tool
- Professional reviews and ratings
- Live pricing
- Great list of discounts
- Direct links to dealers and manufacturers
And what I think is the most important and biggest game changer for Sim Racers:
- Compatibility check for wheels & wheel bases.
Initial thoughts: a good place to build a sim rig
It took me a couple of minutes to get a feel for how to use the tool. It has all the features you’d think an online consolidator should have; you just need to know where to look. Once I found the filtering and sorting functions, I immediately was sucked in. I haven’t seen anywhere online yet that has as smooth a layout as RSS has for Sim Racing. It is very easy to navigate through the various categories and try to keep your build under your target budget.
Best feature: comparison for sim racing rig builder
My favorite part of the Sim Rig Builder is the comparison tool. Especially for wheels or wheel bases, it’s nice to have a side by side comparison of all the features of each instead of having to go through multiple tabs on my computer. It flows well and doesn’t over complicate things. Not sure how helpful it would be, but you can actually compare over 15 products at one time, just in case you have quite a few you are deciding between.
Sharing my sim racing setup build
One thing that was always a pain when designing custom rigs with my friends was compiling unorganized screen shots of my build or typing out a long text. I believe I have found my solution for that nuisance in my life as the Sim Rig Builder has a sharing functionality.
On the “Build Summary” page, you can actually share a link with your friends and it will take them to the exact same build you had just designed. I didn’t realize how cool sharing a build would be, but I’m really glad they added that.
Check this build out that I made on the site.
Discounts that are built into the sim rig configurator
Not surprisingly, RSS has a good amount of discounts on its site for a variety of brands. As I learned, you can sort by “discount size” and see in order the discount amount by component. The Cube Controls Discount they have is the highest I’ve seen available.
Final Take: an awesome sim racing rig builder
Overall, this tool should be a big help to new and current sim racers. Most people don’t know that a sim racing builder even exists (I didn’t until recently), but I wish I had known about this a year ago before I made my last upgrade.
It’s hard to give RSS a score on a scale of 1-10 as I have nothing to compare it to, but if I had to give it a number, I’d say it's an 8.5. Their Sim Rig Configurator does pretty much everything you’d expect, but there are a couple small inconsistencies and missing information (country availability, pricing only shown in USD, some pictures are formatted weird), but I really can’t complain as they are just getting started.
I really hope Ready Set Sim takes off and they keep adding new features to their site. They are on to something and I can’t wait to see where it goes.