Completing The Invicta Family

I am very much looking forward to attending Gamescom this week. Europe’s leading trade show for the gaming industry begins in Cologne, Germany, tomorrow and the Asetek SimSports team will be there to showcase a brand-new product – the Invicta Steering Wheel, just like I will be there to meet with the press.

This is our crown jewel product! The Invicta line is our proof point as it is the very best that we can produce. Since we launched Asetek SimSports a little more than two years ago, we’ve made Invicta pedals and wheelbases but not the wheel, unlike in our other product lines – Forte and La Prima. So, this is something that people have been waiting for and it is something we wanted to get exactly right. We teased the Invicta Wheel during a recent YouTube launch of other products and the reaction was incredible.

I’m a racer myself and the Invicta Wheel is a higher quality steering wheel than I’ve had in any race or hyper car I’ve driven. The housing is CNC manufactured from one piece of billet aluminium, the front face plate is carbon fibre (either twill or forged) with a big surface mounted display, and just the logo on the backside takes an hour to be CNC milled! It’s customisable – the end-user can configurate button colours, carbon type and shifters to name a few, just like you would if you were buying a supercar. You can change the handles to make it either a Formula wheel or an LMP wheel, and the handles will fit all our wheels across all our product lines. This modular approach is cost-effective and a key part of Asetek’s brand philosophy – opening the market, lowering the barriers to entry, and making motorsport and sim-racing more accessible.

It's a high-end steering wheel but you don’t have to be a sim-racing expert to use it. Our own Race Hub software means you can use the default screen layouts that we are providing, but we have also implemented support for SimHub DYI software meaning people can build their own screens and layouts. I’m so pleased with it, I’m very proud of it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’s received at Gamescom this week ahead of a full launch in the autumn.

At Asetek, we are racers at heart with a passion for gaming. In fact, the company’s foundations were built on gaming. I played racing games when I was younger, plus games like ‘Command and Conquer Red Alert’. When I started at university in Aalborg, Denmark, I worked in a team of seven students. We worked together in a small room of about 15m2 and all of us brought our own huge tower PCs with us. I’ve always been interested in the hardware and making things go faster. There was a motocross game that we all used to play, and I was the best in the group even though they were all hardcore gamers. One day we swapped PCs and suddenly I was a long way behind, so I figured out that the faster my CPU was, the faster my game would go. My PC had a homegrown cooling system that froze down the CPU, which again meant it could produce a much higher frame rate which made the game much easier to control. That paved the way for the first Asetek cooling system which I launched the business with. The first systems we built were the legendary VapoChill systems which contained a compressor from a refrigerator. They were massive but it was mainly gamers who bought them because of the frame rate. Asetek has grown from there to now have sold more than 11 million liquid cooling systems.

Kevin Magnussen is a Danish sporting icon and he has played a part in our growth, so I want to finish this article by paying tribute to him following the news of his impending exit from Haas at the end of 2024 after a decade in Formula 1.

The thing I will miss most about watching Kevin in F1 is his race-craft. He is one of the best racers in the field. When most of the other drivers are put under pressure, it almost always ends with a crash. But Kevin passes half a dozen cars during a race time and time again, and he almost always does it cleanly. Also, lots of the drivers like to moan on the radio as soon as something goes wrong, but I hardly ever remember Kevin doing that – he just gets on with the job. He’s a great racer and a very nice guy. He spent a lot of time with our team, helping us to fine-tune our hardware and software. I have raced a lot and my son, Valdemar, is a racer too, but we don’t know how an F1 car feels on track. Kevin came in and said: “You need more of this,” or “you need less of that.” He gave us great credibility and even more authenticity. It was great to spend time with him and see up close how an F1 driver works. It’s been fun watching his F1 career and everyone at Asetek wishes him all the very best for the future.