Moza Racing mBooster Active Pedal

Up to £1,000 for a single pedal. What kind of madness is this? Compared to the Finnish Simucube's ActivePedal Pro in particular, it's a real bargain as that can set you back twice that, but this is also a super-niche segment in sim-racing which seems to have gone a bit crazy, if you ask me. I'm not going to get ahead of myself here, and instead I'm going to rewind the tape a bit, or more fittingly, back up the car...

The Moza Racing mBooster Active Pedal has been in the works for over a year now, and was first shown at Sim Racing Expo 2024 in Germany, where it attracted a lot of attention, as like Simucube's expensive model, it can emulate ABS in a way that a passive pedal obviously cannot. This is because the mBooster houses an industry-standard nine Newton metre servo motor attached to a kind of ball screw design that allows the pedal arm to slide in and out of the electric motor, thus offering vibration, response to both throttle input and ABS activation, and everything in between. The mBooster can be quickly and easily set up as an accelerator or a brake pedal, and for those with extra time on their hands, there is also a clutch profile that can be activated via a scroll bar. It's possible to buy a set of three active pedals plus the pedal plate itself from Moza, which costs an arm a leg, and weighs down your sim-rig by just over 30 kilos.

It's proper stuff. Moza has really spared no expense here and built an incredibly solid pedal that can withstand up to 200 kilos in brake pressure and can push back and vibrate hard enough to make it unpleasant for the driver. I like the form factor more here than in Simucube's ActivePedal, and the Moza version feels smoother, less jagged, or at least more stepless in terms of the actual brake feel (because it's in the brake that this kind of vibration feedback is most important).

mBooster is controlled via Moza's own software Pit House, which today is absolutely brilliant (generally speaking) with a nice, easy-to-understand, clear interface, smart use of clear icons and lots of really good setting options with pedagogically whimsical quick explanations of everything that can be achieved. Pit House is simply brilliant and the new mBooster settings page is certainly no exception. You can set whether you want your pedal to act as a throttle, brake or clutch, you can activate preset profiles that best mimic a Formula 1 car, a GTWC car, and a WRC car at the click of a mouse, and you can also select the brake resistance curve, initial brake pressure, and decide whether or not to have the brake fade emulated. As for the FFB functions, they are also simply and smoothly laid out and depending on which game you play, you can activate a few different functions such as wheel spin, brake lock, ABS, and also lift in simulated engine speed in both the accelerator and the brake, if you want.

As in the case of the Simucube ActivePedal, and as I mentioned in the first paragraph, I think this active pedal thing has gone a bit off the rails and I'm going to tell you why. We at Gamereactor predicted that some kind of force feedback in our sim-racing pedals would be a future trend back in 2021, and we have since then used simple rumble motors mounted on the back of our footplates (which are controlled via Simhub). These motors and their functionality have meant a lot for the feeling of driving a real car in our racing rig and today we have them set to vibrate according to engine speed, when we unlock the wheels, spin with all fours, and when ABS kicks in, especially in Assetto Corsa Competizione.

This is something that everyone who loves sim-racing must try. It provides so much immersion with so little means, because the amount of vibration that we activate behind our footplates is typically very, very small. Here at Gamereactor, we all sim-race in our socks, which means that the motors only need to generate small amounts of vibration to be felt very clearly in our feet. Building 10 kilo single pedals with nine N⋅m servo motors in each pedal to emulate 200 kilo brake pressure feels to me a bit like going clay pigeon shooting with a minigun. It's overkill to the point of being silly, and even though the FFB feeling is great, I'm still sceptical about these fully active pedals as they feel today.

The problem with Simucube's expensive alternative, which also plagues Moza's version (although in different ways), is that it feels so clear that I am pushing a strut into a servo motor, which should then be pushed back towards my foot. In the Moza pedal, the ball screw is also felt, which means that it never really feels like a brake in a racing car, regardless of settings. I made this criticism of the Simucube ActivePedal and stand by it, and I think it only takes a minute in a track car to realise that the "active" part of these active pedals makes the braking sensation itself disconnected from the force feedback portion, and therefore feel more passive than ever. There is a small delay of a tiny tenth where the strut that is pushed into the engine is to come out again, which feels artificial and unnatural in both this pedal and Simucube's version and I would probably most like to compare it to the feeling when you have air in the brake system on your sports car. This is also not possible to trim away via set-ups in Pit House as it is about basic construction.

Two mBooster Active Pedals plus a base plate will cost you £1,000 and the performance that these offer and the feeling they evoke can be obtained more easily and less expensively in a brake pedal that feels more like a real brake out of a real race car, if you ask me. The Heusinkveld Ultimate Plus (with two pedals costs around £980) remains the best pedals in the sim-racing world and if you supplement these with the "Pedal Rumble Motor Kit" from British Sim 3D (£100 including shipping) you have a solution that provides the same type of vibration-based feedback and pedals that feel more natural and above all more "direct". Now, this may change when racing games are released where the telemetry allows for full simulation of real ABS, which Moza can then interpret in a different way than today, but until then I have a hard time recommending mBooster over the options above.