F33L SR2 Sim Racing Gloves

As part of the Battle of the Racing Gloves 2019, we’re going to review F33L’s SR2 Sim Racing Gloves.

The SR2s are an affordable solution if you want to treat your alcantara steering wheel grips with care, or your hands, or when you just want to improve your feeling of raciness.

You can find F33L’s homepage here. At the time of this writing, they specialized on gloves and caps (but I am not into caps ;)).

The 0th Impression

Initially, I wanted to review several of F33L’s models, but unfortunately, F33L’s webshop had just the SR2 available at the time I ordered.

Bad luck 😐

Ordering & Delivery

Apart from the run out stocks, the whole purchasing process was quick and flawless. After ordering, it took just a few days till delivery.

Unboxing

1st Impression

To be honest, the gloves look and feel a bit cheap, and I am not even sure if the seams will last long.

The feel (f33l?) alone is quite good, but don’t expect your hands be kept warm when using outside in the winter – but then, these are simracing gloves, not winter gloves. In turn, this means that the F33Ls will probably work well even in warm Europe summers.

Fit

The gloves fit quite well, there’s no dead volume between fingers – all fingers reach to my hand, while at the same time there is no dead space on the tip of any finger.

Good!

Test Drive in Real Car

Fortunately, I can do some test drives in a real car whose power-steering is broken, i.e. you’ll need to apply quite some strength to turn the car around apexes. Ideal for testing driving gloves!

Thanks to the velcro strips, the gloves sat quite well all the time on a 30 minute drive. The grip was just perfect; at no point during the drive had I the slightest feeling of losing control.

Even more so, the grip is not too much. I’ve also used full-leather gloves for driving in the past, and while they didn’t offer the rubber’ish grip that the F33L SR2’s offer, they sometimes simply sticked to the wheel, as if someone applied glue on them – but not so the F33Ls.

As mentioned earlier, these gloves can be considered summer gloves. From my testing so far, there will be almost no heat buildup inside.

Furthermore, these gloves are light. Actually, apart from the exam gloves, these are the lightest gloves in my test series.

F33L delivers what they promised!

However, there are two issues:

1. The grips on the inside grip so well, they accumulated quite some dust. And then, because they are also quite soft, my hand worked the dust well into those grips.
2. The pinky finger’s grip side turned half way outside. This is a problem I have experienced quite often already, so maybe that’s a problem specific to me? Hmm :wave:

Also, I am not sure how many drives the gloves will survive, yet. I really don’t want to bad-mouth the durability of the seams, but to me as a layman, they simply look and feel less robust than the competition.

I hope someone (or I myself) will disprove my concern, because apart from these points, I really enjoyed the drive.

Touchscreens …

Using the F33L SR2 on a touchscreen works, but not toooooo well, especially when you use some protective glass on the touchscreen. You have to apply some more strength as without gloves to make it work, which in turn means that the gloves don’t fit well to sensitive or fine touchscreen operation.

However, I think this is not very relevant to many sim racers, which prefer physical buttons and knobs anyways.

But if you do your telemetry on a touchscreen, you may want to keep this in mind.

Recommend or Not?

It’s too early for a long term statement, as I still want to test how well the seams survive more of my non-power-steering-test-drives.

But my guts think that these gloves are a good bang for the buck. They feel good (apart from the outside-facing pinky finger), their grippiness is exactly right (very grippy, but not gluey), they look racy and they can be put on and off quickly.

So yes, I can recommend the F33L SR2, with the constraint that the long term test is still in the works.