In twelve years, the torque output of sim racing wheel bases has multiplied nearly twentyfold. The real cars they are meant to simulate still produce exactly what they produced back then. On 1 August 2026, Sim-Lab opened reservations for its first two direct drive wheel bases. The smaller one delivers 26 Nm. The larger one delivers 39. That is the highest figure a consumer wheel base has ever carried, four above the previous ceiling, and the reaction online was immediate and predictable. Somebody asked who exactly they were planning to murder. The joke conceals a legitimate question the industry has spent a decade avoiding: at what point did we stop chasing realism and start chasing a number? The starting point: two newton metres and a gearbox To grasp the scale of the jump, it helps to remember where we came from. A consumer-grade geared wheel, the kind Logitech still sells today for a couple of hundred euros, produces a little over two newton metres. Belt-driven systems, one rung up, push that to three or four. For nearly two decades, that was the ceiling of what an enthusiast could have at home. The problem was not just the force. Between the motor and the driver’s hands sat gears, belts and pulleys, and every one of those components ate part of the information. What reached the wheel was a filtered, flattened, slightly delayed version of what the simulator had calculated. Kerb strikes arrived rounded off. Loss of grip arrived late. 2013: the people who removed the belt The idea of bolting a steering wheel straight onto a motor shaft did not come from the games industry. It came from industrial automation. In Tampere, Finland, a company called Granite Devices had been building control electronics for servo motors since 2006. Its founder arrived