A pedal can be more than a spring.
A passive pedal gets its feel from springs and elastomers that compress as you push against them. Changing that feel means guesswork and trying different spring rates and elastomer stacks. For a long time, that was it. Nobody questioned it, because nothing better existed.
Simucube co-founder Tero Kontkanen believed sim racers deserved more. That a pedal could be more than a fixed piece of metal and rubber.
In 2022, we changed what was possible in sim racing. ActivePedal is servo-driven: force, travel, and feel live in software instead of hardware. There was no established market waiting for it, because active pedals never existed. We built it and created the category.
Four years on, and we can see that idea changed sim racing history. Active pedals are no longer a curiosity. More manufacturers are building them. More reviewers are comparing them. More sim racers are asking a question that didn't use to make sense: why would you buy another passive pedal?
The same shift, happening again with sim racing pedals
If this sounds familiar, it should.
Sim racing has been through a transition like this before. Belt-driven and gear-driven wheelbases used to be normal, and direct drive was the expensive, slightly strange alternative. Then drivers felt it, and the category simply moved. Today, all serious rigs are built around direct drive.
Pedals are going through the same shift, this time between passive and active. A passive pedal is mechanically adjusted. Changing the feel of a passive pedal means guesswork and trying different spring rates and elastomer stacks.
An active pedal is programmable. Its feel is a setting, not a spring, so it can change with the car, the driver, or the moment in the race, and the simulation can send information back through it instead of only taking input from it. It's a different kind of pedal.
Are active pedals a luxury? Calling it a luxury misses what it is. In sim racing, luxury usually means a better version of the same idea: a CNC-machined pedal face instead of stamped steel, tighter bearings, a stiffer chassis. Upgrade any of it and you get a better spring, a better elastomer. Same principle, nicer parts. An active pedal replaces the principle: a motor turning a screw creates the resistance, so force and travel are no longer decided by the parts fitted inside. Direct drive was once called a luxury next to belt-driven wheelbases, too.
We like seeing the active pedal category grow. A few years ago, we were pretty much the only ones building active pedals, and it was a little lonely out here. Today, more brands are joining us, and each one is more proof that the idea holds up. It's good to have the company, and the more the category grows, the more racers can enter the active era.
Why a spring can't do what a motor can
Every passive pedal, whether it's built around springs or elastomers, has a compromise built into the hardware: force and travel are physically linked. Stiffen the brake and you shorten the travel. Soften it for more travel and you lose the resistance your leg calibrates against. You can choose your compromise. You can't remove it.
An active pedal removes this problem. Force and travel become independent settings. A firm pedal with long, progressive travel, a combination passive hardware can't produce, is yours in a few clicks. That's exactly where threshold braking lives, especially in cars without ABS, where the limit and the lockup are millimetres apart.
Feel becomes a setting
Because ActivePedal is servo-driven and lives on Simucube Tuner software, every part of its feel is adjustable: force curve, travel, bite point, deadzone, and even whether it works as a brake, throttle, or clutch. It's all done from the seat in Simucube Tuner, mid-session if you want.
Tuner also switches profiles automatically. It recognizes the sim you're running and loads the matching profile: a stiff, short GT3 brake in one title, a long-travel vintage pedal in another. You can stop adapting your braking to your hardware and start setting the hardware to the car.
If you've ever swapped elastomers between practice and a race, you already understand the value. If you haven't, that's the point. You never will.
So, is an active pedal worth it?
That's the honest question, and it deserves an honest answer.
An active pedal won't make you faster. No pedal does. That part is seat time, and there's no shortcut for sale here.
If your pedals already do everything you need, and you never find yourself wanting to change how they feel, a passive pedal can serve you well for a long time.
However, if you've ever wanted your brake to feel different from one car to the next, caught yourself swapping springs to chase a better feel, or wished it felt exactly the same lap after lap and session after session, that's where an active pedal starts to make sense. A passive pedal's feel is fixed the day it's built, it drifts as it ages, and changing it costs you a toolkit every time. An active pedal is set in software, in seconds, and it stays exactly where you left it. It keeps adapting to you and your needs.
Owners often tell us it made them better drivers, and it comes down to two things:
- The first is consistency: hit the same brake pressure lap after lap and you build the confidence to brake at the limit instead of short of it.
- The second is information: a pedal that clearly signals what the car and tyres are doing lets you catch a mistake before it costs you the corner, instead of finding out after.
Once you've felt that difference, going back is the hard part. It does take time to dial in, and the speed still has to come from you. But an active pedal makes your practice count. Everything after that is still you.
ActivePedal Sport: the way in
We've spent four years building ActivePedal Pro and Ultimate for drivers who wanted the most force, the most travel, and the most control available. That part of the range isn't going anywhere.
What's changed is who gets to start there. ActivePedal Sport takes everything we've learned since 2022, the engineering, the manufacturing, the software, the support, and puts it into the shortest ActivePedal we've made: a compact, more accessible package with the same technology as the rest of the range.
Behind every ActivePedal is a force feedback motor, custom electronics, and mechanics built to handle serious force without flexing or drifting off calibration, lap after lap. It's industrial-grade engineering doing a job passive hardware was never asked to do.
"We didn't make ActivePedal cheaper. We're making the active era bigger. ActivePedal Sport takes the technology that changed what a sim racing pedal can be and brings it within reach of far more racers. That was the goal from the beginning."
— Marko Lepola, Product Manager at Simucube
The active era has already started
We don't expect you to take our word for any of this. Visitors at SimRacing Expo Frankfurt were among the first to feel ActivePedal Sport, and the first reviews are coming out in November.
Pedals spent a long time being the one part of the rig nobody expected to change. We don't think that's true anymore. The active era has already started. ActivePedal Pro and Ultimate have proved the idea works. ActivePedal Sport is how a lot more of you get to join it.
Sign up to be among the first to buy ActivePedal Sport when it arrives in early 2027.
