The OG Steering Wheel Guide

Picking a steering wheel gets complicated surprisingly fast. Start looking at dish, diameter, flat bottoms, spoke layouts, and formula wheels that barely resemble a traditional steering wheel at all… and there’s a lot more to consider than just what looks good in the car.

These differences go beyond looks. The right steering wheel can improve your driving position, give you more space, change how the car steers, or just make things feel more comfortable. And what works perfectly in one car might not make any sense at all in another.

With more than 100 steering wheels to choose from at OG Racing, there’s a wheel for just about every kind of setup- but that also means figuring out what all those differences actually mean. So let’s talk shapes, sizes, spokes, dish, and what you should be looking at when it’s time to pick one.

Let’s Start With Diameter

 

A few millimeters might not sound like much, but steering wheel diameter can make a surprisingly noticeable difference from the driver’s seat.

Smaller-diameter wheels take up less space in the cockpit and require less hand movement for a given steering input. The tradeoff is leverage. As the wheel gets smaller, steering effort increases- something you’ll notice a lot more in a car without power steering.

Go larger and you gain leverage, reducing the force you need to apply to the wheel. You also have more wheel taking up space between you and your legs.

Most racing steering wheels are listed by diameter in millimeters. As a quick reference, 320 mm is about 12.6 inches, 330 mm is about 13 inches + 350 mm is about 13.8 inches. You’ll see plenty of traditional racing wheels in that 320–350 mm range, while more specialized designs can go considerably smaller.

What makes sense for you within that range depends a lot on what the car is asking you to do with the wheel.

Formula cars, purpose-built prototypes (you know, the racecars we’d all have if budgets weren’t a thing) and other assorted rocket ships tend toward the smaller end of the spectrum. Quick steering, tight cockpits and relatively small steering angles mean the driver can keep their hands planted and make the inputs they need without ever reaching for another part of the wheel.

Rally driving and drifting ask something very different from the driver. The wheel can travel through much larger angles as the driver catches slides and makes rapid corrections, which means their hands aren't necessarily staying at 9 + 3. You’ll commonly see wheels around 330–350 mm in these applications, giving the driver more leverage and a full-size rim to grab as the wheel moves through their hands.

Circuit racing covers just about everything in between. Think about the difference between hustling a Spec E30 through a tight corner and driving a modern GT car with power steering and a much quicker steering rack. One may have you working through considerably more steering angle, while the other can accomplish the same direction change with much smaller movements at your hands.

Round vs. Flat Bottom

 

Next question: how much of a circle do you actually need?

A traditional round steering wheel gives you an uninterrupted rim no matter where your hands end up. If you’re feeding the wheel through your hands, catching countersteer or regularly turning the wheel far enough that your hands have to leave 9 and 3, that matters. You can add lock, cross your hands (hopefully because you’re drifting), or let the wheel unwind back through them without having to think about where the rim is going to be when you reach for it again.

Picture a rally car being thrown into a tight hairpin or a drift car snapping through a transition. In both cases, the wheel may travel through a substantial amount of rotation in a very short amount of time. A round rim gives the driver the same shape to grab whether the wheel is centered, buried in opposite lock or somewhere in between.

A flat-bottom wheel starts to make sense when you don’t need all of that rim in the first place. And, yes, sometimes you just think it looks cooler in the car. That’s a perfectly valid reason to keep reading.

Removing the lowest section creates more space where racecars are notoriously short on it: between the driver’s legs and the steering wheel. Climb into a tight cockpit, and your knees are already negotiating for real estate around the steering column, and that extra clearance suddenly feels a lot less cosmetic.

Of course, there’s a catch- you’ve removed part of the steering wheel. In a car with quick steering and relatively small steering inputs, that may not matter at all. If your hands spend most of a lap planted around 9 and 3 and the wheel only moves a fraction of a turn in either direction, they may never get anywhere near the missing section.

Follow that logic far enough, and you get the squared-off, open-wheel shapes found in modern GT cars, prototypes, and formula cars. At that point, designers aren’t trying to preserve a circle at all. They’re putting grips exactly where the driver’s hands live and using the remaining space for visibility, clearance and, increasingly, displays and controls.

Dished vs. Flat

 

Diameter and shape determine what you’re holding. Dish helps determine where you’re holding it.

A dished steering wheel moves the rim toward the driver while the center of the wheel stays mounted in the same place. Dish, like diameter, is measured in millimeters, and the number tells you how far the rim is offset from the mounting surface. A 0 mm dish is essentially flat, while 30–40 mm gives you a moderate offset, and deeper wheels can reach 80–90 mm or more. The bigger the number, the farther the rim comes back toward you.

That’s useful when your seat and pedals are where they need to be, but you’re still reaching for the wheel. Instead of changing your entire driving position, adding dish can bring the wheel back to you. Deeper-dish wheels are common in rally and drifting for the same reason, and they also create more room for your hands as you work around the rim.

But more dish isn’t automatically better. Your hub adapter, quick release and wheel all contribute to where the rim ultimately ends up. A flat or minimally dished wheel makes more sense when the rest of the steering setup already puts your hands where they need to be. So rather than asking “how much dish do I want?” start with where you actually need the wheel to end up.

Two Spokes or Three?

 

If someone tells you to picture a racing steering wheel, there’s a pretty good chance your brain just drew three spokes. Two stretching toward the grips around 9 and 3, with a third running down toward the bottom of the rim. It’s the familiar layout, and you’ll find some version of it in just about every kind of motorsport.

Take away that bottom spoke and you’ve got a two-spoke wheel, with a lot more open space through the lower half.

That can matter when your hands are busy. Picture working the wheel through a rally stage, where you’re adding lock, unwinding it and repositioning your hands as quickly as the next corner shows up. Removing that lower spoke gives your hands one less thing to encounter as they move across the wheel. It can also leave a clearer view of gauges or displays sitting behind it.

But a third spoke isn’t automatically getting in your way, either. Spoke placement varies considerably between wheels. Some angle sharply downward, some sit nearly horizontal and others leave huge openings between them. Two three-spoke wheels can feel very different once your hands actually start moving around them.

So don’t get too hung up on two versus three. Look at where the spokes actually sit, what you need to see through the wheel and where your hands are likely to go when things get busy.

And Then There Are Formula Wheels…

 

Eventually we can stop arguing about how much of the circle to remove and just get rid of most of it.

Formula-style wheels take everything we’ve talked about so far to its logical extreme. In a car with quick steering where the driver’s hands rarely leave 9 and 3, there’s not much reason to keep a rim where their hands are never going to go. So instead of designing around a circle, these wheels are designed around the driver’s hands.

That’s how you end up with tiny dimensions, open tops and bottoms, squared-off shapes and molded grips that look a whole lot different from the steering wheel in your street car. The driver gets exactly what they need to make steering inputs without wasting precious cockpit space on the rest.

And once their hands have a permanent address, you can start putting everything else within reach. Buttons, rotary switches, paddle shifters and displays can all live on the wheel, letting the driver make adjustments without taking a hand away from the grips.

The same thinking has made its way into modern GT and prototype racing, where steering wheels increasingly look more like something you'd expect to find in a fighter jet than a car.

Put one in a rally or drift car, though, and the problem becomes obvious pretty quickly. The second you need to release the wheel, catch it somewhere else or let it feed through your hands, you start missing all those pieces of rim you decided you didn’t need.

So, Which One?

If you were hoping there was one steering wheel we could point to and say “yep, that’s the one,” sorry.

The right wheel starts with the car and the driver. Think about how much you actually move your hands, how heavy the steering is, how much room you have between the wheel and your legs, where the wheel needs to sit once you’re strapped in and what you need to be able to see behind it.

Once you know those things, diameter, shape, dish and spoke layout stop looking like a bunch of different ways to make a steering wheel. They start looking like solutions to very specific problems.

And suddenly those 100+ steering wheels at OG Racing get a whole lot easier to narrow down.