You copy a settings sheet off a forum. You type every number in exactly as written, go out on track, and it feels wrong — either dead, or so noisy the wheel sounds like a food processor. So you assume you mistyped something, or that your base is faulty.
You probably did nothing wrong. If that sheet came from a different brand of wheel base, iRacing had already moved your starting point before you touched a single slider — and it's published in iRacing's own release notes.
The 20 dB nobody mentions
iRacing's 2025 Season 3 Patch 2 release notes — build 2025.06.21.01, modified Mon, Jun 23, 2025 — contain a short block under Controls headed "LFE system improvements for force feedback have been added, including:". Four lines follow. Two of them are the whole story:
"Moza wheels now have their master volume set -15 dB lower."
"Fanatec wheels now have their master volume set +5 dB higher."
Read that twice. In one patch, on the same day, iRacing pushed two brands in opposite directions — one down 15, one up 5. That is a 20 dB gap between a MOZA base and a Fanatec base sitting at what each of them calls default.
Decibels are logarithmic, so 20 dB is not "a bit". It is a factor of ten in amplitude. If you and your mate both have your Wheel LFE master volume in the middle of the slider, and he's on a ClubSport DD and you're on an R9, you are not listening to the same mix. You are not even close.
That is the mechanical reason cross-brand settings sheets do not transfer, and it is why so much of the settings advice on the internet is quietly wrong.
What this offset actually touches — and what it doesn't
This is where people misread the note, so let me be precise, because the distinction matters more than the number does.
This is not your steering force feedback strength. Nothing in that patch changed how hard your wheel pushes back in a corner, your Strength value, your Min Force, or your torque. Wheel LFE — Low Frequency Effects — is the haptics layer: engine vibration, kerb texture, gear shifts, wheel slip, the fizz layered on top of the steering forces. It's the same feature Fanatec markets as FullForce and Logitech markets as TrueForce, and if that naming mess is new to you, I wrote a whole page on what Wheel LFE, TrueForce and FullForce actually are.
So the −15 / +5 offset moves the volume of the texture, not the weight of the wheel. Your buzz, rattle and rumble are affected enormously; your steering feel isn't.
One thing I won't claim, because iRacing doesn't publish it: where in the signal chain that offset sits relative to your own slider. The notes say only that the master volume is set lower or higher, and that "you can further reduce the volume in the Misc. tab of the Sim options, using the master volume slider in the Wheel LFE settings." The honest reading is that iRacing picks the default and your slider moves you from there. Anyone drawing you a precise block diagram of the gain stages is guessing.
Why iRacing did it
The same patch says so plainly:
"These changes should rebalance the mix for Moza wheel users, greatly reducing the audible noise the wheel produces when the Wheel LFE system is enabled."
That was the whole point. When iRacing switched the MOZA API on in the 2025 Season 3 build, a lot of MOZA owners found their base making a genuinely unpleasant high-frequency noise — MOZA's own support page still opens its iRacing FAQ with the exact question people were typing: "Why does my wheelbase vibrate at a high frequency and make abnormal noises after the iRacing update?"
So iRacing turned MOZA down hard, and gave Fanatec 5 dB back. Neither number is a judgement on the hardware. It's a mix decision, taken per manufacturer, by the sim.
The second invisible layer: TrueForce gain resets to 100%
There's a follow-up that is arguably more annoying, and it comes from the 2025 Season 4 build (2025.09.08.02):
"A new variable, [TrueForce] trueForceSetGain= 1, has been added to the "app.ini" file."
"This value lets users turn off the auto setting of TrueForce gain to 100% when the Sim launches. This is helpful for users who use the wheel tuning menu to adjust the feel of TrueForce, rather than the built-in TrueForce gain hotkeys."
Sit with the implication. By default, iRacing forces the TrueForce/LFE gain to 100% every time the sim starts. If you tune your haptics on the base — the FUL value in a Fanatec tuning menu, or your settings in MOZA Pit House — iRacing has been overwriting it at launch, and you'd have no idea unless you went looking.
If you're one of those people, set trueForceSetGain=0 in Documents\iRacing\app.ini and your base-side value will stick. If you tune from inside the sim, leave it alone.
The other two lines from that patch
The Patch 2 block had two more items worth knowing, because both are useful for spotting stale advice:
"Road texture effect now has its default gain set to -30 dB."
"Drive shaft effect has been turned off and removed from the app.ini file."
The road texture number is the one that catches people out. Fanatec publishes −25 dB as its recommended road texture value for iRacing, which reads like a heavy cut and is actually 5 dB above iRacing's own default. I unpack that properly in the Fanatec FullForce settings guide.
And there's a contradiction I'd rather publish than paper over. MOZA's own iRacing support article — modified Mon, 1 Jun, re-checked today — reproduces iRacing's [TrueForce] block showing volTrueForcePhysRoadTexture_dB=0.000000, not −30. It also still lists volTrueForcePhysDriveShaft_dB, a channel iRacing says it removed. Both sources are official. Neither states which build its snapshot came from. Open your own app.ini and read the number that is genuinely in it rather than trusting either of us.
That drive shaft line is also a free date-stamp: any guide still telling you to tune a drive shaft channel was written before June 2025.
Have these offsets changed since?
I checked every iRacing build published after 2025.06.21.01, up to the newest one available as I write this — 2026 Season 3 Patch 3 Hotfix 2, build 2026.07.17.01. No later release note mentions a per-brand master volume, a dB offset for any manufacturer, the road texture default, or the drive shaft effect.
What did happen to Wheel LFE since is lifecycle, not levels:
- 2025 S3 Patch 3 Hotfix 1 (2025.07.02.02) — "We have temporarily disabled Moza 360 Hz and Wheel LFE effects", pending a crash investigation with MOZA.
- 2025 S3 Patch 4 (2025.07.25.02) — "360Hz and Wheel LFE APIs have been re-enabled", plus fixes for a MOZA memory instability and an intermittent Fanatec crash.
- 2026 S2 Initial (2026.03.09.03) — "The VNM Simulation API has been updated, which fixes a 360 Hz/Wheel LFE mode issue."
So the June 2025 numbers are still the last published word. They're also exactly the kind of value that could be quietly rebalanced in a future season build without anyone writing it up — if your haptics mix suddenly changes character after a season update, this is the first place I'd look.
So what do you actually do?
Honestly, not much — but do it in the right order.
Stop importing settings across brands. Not "adjust them slightly". The starting point differs by 20 dB, so a Fanatec sheet on a MOZA base is arithmetic on the wrong baseline. Use it for the shape of the mix — which effects are loud, which are quiet — and set the levels by ear on your own hardware.
Fix the master before the channels. If your wheel is noisy, pull the Wheel LFE master volume down first. Only cut individual effects once the overall level is sane. Cutting eight channels to fix one master is a lot of work for a worse result.
Know which layer you're fighting. A high-frequency buzz after an update is almost always Wheel LFE, not 360 Hz mode. They're separate features that arrived together and get blamed for each other constantly; I've laid out which is which in the iRacing 360 Hz FFB mode guide.
Check the right screen. The 2026 Season 3 build moved the advanced FFB and haptics settings onto a new Force Feedback and Haptics page and never published what landed where, so older guides — including iRacing's own documentation — still point you at Settings > Driving. The FFB and Haptics page guide covers that reshuffle. For the steering side, which none of this touches, start with my iRacing wheel and FFB settings guide.
And to be blunt: none of this will make you faster. Haptics tell you things you should already be reading through the steering. It reduces fatigue on a long stint and makes the sim more pleasant, which is worth having — but it is not lap time, and it is not a reason to buy a different wheel base.
FAQ
Does this affect my normal force feedback strength? No. The per-brand offset applies to the Wheel LFE master volume — the haptics and vibration layer. Your steering forces, Strength, Min Force and torque output are untouched by it.
Why is my MOZA quieter than my mate's Fanatec in iRacing? Because iRacing made it that way. The 2025 Season 3 Patch 2 build set MOZA's Wheel LFE master volume 15 dB lower and Fanatec's 5 dB higher, in the same patch, to fix an audible-noise problem on MOZA bases.
Can I undo the offset?
Not directly — iRacing doesn't expose it as a user setting. You compensate with your own master volume slider in the Wheel LFE settings and, if you need more, the per-effect dB values in the [TrueForce] section of Documents\iRacing\app.ini.
Does the offset apply to every MOZA base? The note says "Moza wheels" without qualification, and MOZA's own support page says every MOZA base supports 360 Hz and Wheel LFE. iRacing has never published a per-model breakdown, so I'm not going to invent one.
My FUL / Pit House haptics setting keeps resetting — why?
Almost certainly the launch behaviour added in 2025 Season 4: iRacing auto-sets TrueForce gain to 100% when the sim starts. Set trueForceSetGain=0 in app.ini to stop it.
Is Logitech or Simucube offset too? Not that iRacing has published. The only per-brand master volume changes in any release note are the MOZA and Fanatec ones from June 2025. Absence of a note isn't proof of absence of an offset — it just means nobody outside iRacing can tell you.
How do I know what my base is actually doing? Measure rather than guess. Running WheelCheck tells you about your steering FFB linearity, which is the layer that actually affects your driving — and the one worth getting right first.