Thrustmaster TX Leather Edition review: the Xbox racer's belt-drive answer

Sim-racing hardware has always tilted PlayStation. Gran Turismo drives wheel sales, so brands license PlayStation first and Xbox gets afterthoughts — which leaves Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon players, one of the biggest racing audiences in the Gulf, with slim pickings above the entry tier. The TX is the correction: the same platform as our editor's-choice T300, built and licensed natively for Xbox.

That means the important internals carry over unchanged: the ~25-watt brushless servomotor, the dual-belt transmission that smooths its output into continuous torque, and H.E.A.R.T contactless magnetic sensing at 16-bit resolution that never wears. Everything we wrote about the T300's drive character applies here — on the console that usually doesn't get it.

The Leather Edition's 28 cm rim is hand-stitched leather — not the leather-accent trim of cheaper wheels, but a full wrap of the kind you'd expect a class up. Grip stays consistent through long, warm Gulf sessions where rubberised rims get tacky, and after 40 hours ours had settled in rather than worn in. Between the rim and the metal paddle shifters, the TX's cockpit feel punches above its score.

On the rig the TX behaves exactly as its platform promises: elastic, continuous self-centering with none of the gear-drive ratchet, kerbs as discrete thumps, grip loss telegraphed early enough to catch. In Forza Motorsport the default profile is strong; we ran overall force a notch down to keep detail through the fast esses. In multi-platform titles like F1 25 and Assetto Corsa (PC), it reads within a hair of the T300 — same motor, same belts, same story.

Its score sits slightly below the T300's (7.3 vs 7.5 on feel) for one honest reason: firmware and game-profile polish. PlayStation titles have had a decade of tuning against the T300; the Xbox ecosystem's wheel support is simply younger. The gap is small and shrinking with updates.

The TX shares the quick-release collar of its PlayStation twin, which means the whole add-on rim catalogue — Ferrari F1 rims, Sparco rally rims, open-wheel rims — mounts here too, along with the TH8A shifter, TSS handbrake and the T-LCM load-cell pedal upgrade. The included T3PA three-pedal set is the familiar starting point: solid throttle and clutch, a brake you'll eventually want to upgrade. For an Xbox racer, this ecosystem is the difference between buying a wheel and buying a platform — nothing else on the console offers it at this depth.