I’m sitting in the pit lane at Donington Park circuit. My car’s a 1992 Mercedes 190E Evo 2, a blocky German touring car ideal for close-quarters racing. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get it into first gear. You see, while the new Logitech RS H-pattern gear shifter I’ve been testing out has proven easy to set up with 99% of my racing library, introducing it to Raceroom Racing Experience has proved a bit more eventful.
That’s not the shifter’s fault. Raceroom, the quirky rain-free and slightly aged bloke that it is, is being a bit eccentric. Most PC racing games are designed to let you drive any of their cars with whatever mishmash of compatible hardware you’ve got – controllers, wheels, keyboards, full rigs that take up half a room. You can bind anything to any button and be merrily shifting away with flappy paddles in Euro Truck Simulator as you watch your avatar do the same with the proper gear stick that actual trucks have. Raceroom, by default, has no such patience for your whims.
Its cars permit three types of gear shifting. One, paddle shifting, which requires flicking the plastic or metal triggers found on most racing wheels; one paddle goes up through the gears one by one in order and the other goes back down. Two, sequential shifting, which goes up and down through the gears in order as paddle shifting does but can use a gear stick that just moves directly forward and back to do it rather than wheel triggers. And three, there’s the most old school, and the one your road car likely uses if it’s a manual: H-pattern shifting. Moving the stick up and left gets you into first gear, back from there goes into second, up and slightly to the right grabs third, directly back from third is fourth, and so on. You move your stick horizontally to slot it into each gear, rather than the more racing car-oriented methods that just entail pushing or pulling forward or back to immediately bump up or down a single gear.
In Raceroom, each car specially matches its shifting style to that of its real-life counterpart. So, if you try to change gear in a sequential shifting car with an H-pattern shifter you’ve just plugged in, nothing happens. I can’t recall the opposite ever having been a problem for me, which is curious, but also I assume part of a test specifically aimed at H-shifter users. Because as far as I can tell, Raceroom doesn’t clearly tell you, when you’re picking a car, which type of shifting it uses. Cue me and a bunch of forum users having to find out via trial and error, like we’re playing some sort of car nerd carnival game.
Up until giving this RS H-Shifter a go, I’d managed to log about 400 hours in Raceroom without ever running into its H-pattern mystery box. As much as racing games have always been my bread and butter, starting off with arcade romps like Burnout Paradise as a kid and branching out into sims as I’ve gotten older, I wasn’t a manual gear shifter until a couple of years ago. Even after learning to drive an H-pattern car in real life, I tended to stick with automatic in games out of muscle memory and a struggle to multitask at the speed required for it when going flat out down twisty trails or while wheel-to-wheel with foes. I’ve since made a concerted effort to get into the manual shifting groove, initially via my Logitech G29 wheel’s built-in paddles. Trying out this RS H-Shifter has been my first proper crack at using a physical gear stick for it, and it’s gone more swimmingly than I thought.
To be fair, the RS H-Shifter’s clearly built to be as accessible and user-friendly as the G29 is. Both I’d class as being just above entry level sim racing hardware, costing a fair chunk less than the more complex or customizable rigs and wheels you might splash out for if you spend every weekend on iRacing or are a professional driver looking to have a bit of job-adjacent fun. All I want from racing hardware is something that can be set up in a few minutes by simply strapping it to my desk and then provides a solidly realistic feel as I pound around some virtual laps, slam into people in Wreckfest 2, or do some truck simming for a few hours at a time.
On that front, the RS H-Shifter’s brill. There are only three bits to stick together out of the box, with a gear knob slotting onto the stick protruding from the gearbox itself, then a desk clamp attaching to the gearbox with four nicely chunky screws. From there, you wind the clamp up until it’s tight on your desk or table, plug the cable directly into the back of your PC (
