Plug it in. That is the good news about Xbox wheels: if the box says Xbox on it, the console recognises it in about four seconds, no drivers, no firmware wizard, no launcher. The bad news is everything that happens before and after that moment, which is why you searched this at night instead of racing. So here is the answer up front. If you are buying fresh for a Series S or Series X in 2026, the Thrustmaster T248 at around $300 is where I would start for most people, the Fanatec CSL DD (with the Xbox-licensed hub, around $450 to $500 before pedals) is where I would go if you already know you will stick with this, and the Logitech G923 is fine but overpriced for what it is. Anything not explicitly Xbox-licensed will not work, ever, no matter what adapter someone on a forum swears by.
The rest of this article is about getting whichever one you bought from the shipping box to a proper lap of Bathurst in Forza Motorsport without the usual first-week misery. I have done this on a Series S in a spare bedroom and on a Series X in a proper rig, and the pain points are the same both times.
The licensing thing, because it trips up half the people who email me
Xbox does not let generic USB input devices talk to games. A wheel needs Microsoft’s security chip inside it, which means the manufacturer paid for a licence and the box has that little green Xbox logo. Thrustmaster sells “Xbox” versions of its wheels (T128, T248, T300 is PlayStation only, TS-XW is the Xbox big brother). Logitech’s G923 comes in an Xbox variant. Fanatec does it differently: the licence lives in the steering wheel rim, not the base, so a CSL DD works on Xbox only if you attach a rim like the Fanatec CSL Elite Steering Wheel WRC or the ClubSport Steering Wheel Formula V2.5 X that has the Xbox chip. Moza, Simagic, Asetek, Simucube: no Xbox support at all as of this writing, and Moza has been “working on it” long enough that I would not plan a purchase around it.
The PlayStation-to-Xbox adapter market (Brook, Titan, Cronus) technically exists. Those boxes mostly present the wheel as a gamepad, which means you lose force feedback, and force feedback is the entire reason you are not using a controller. Skip it.
The Series S question specifically: there is no difference in wheel support between the S and the X. Same USB ports, same OS, same licensing. The S has less GPU, so Forza Motorsport runs at a lower resolution and in Performance mode it sits at 60fps rather than the X’s option for 4K, but the input pipeline is identical. Don’t let anyone talk you into “the S can’t handle a direct drive wheel.” The console does not know or care how many newton-metres the base makes.
Unboxing to first lap, in the order that actually works
Do the mounting before you plug anything in. Everyone does this backwards, gets excited, clamps the wheel to the edge of an IKEA desk with the two supplied clamps, and then discovers on the first Turn 1 at Spa that a 2.5 Nm belt wheel is enough to walk a lightweight desk across a laminate floor. The T248 has decent clamps but the mounting plate is small; if your desk lip is thicker than about 55mm, the clamp will not close, and you will be off to the hardware store for longer M6 bolts. The G923 clamps close on almost anything, which is one of the few things I will say in its favour.
If you are going CSL DD, do not desk-clamp it. Fanatec’s own table clamp is a separate purchase (around $40) and even at the default 5 Nm the base will flex a cheap desk enough that the feedback goes mushy right when you need it, in the middle of catching a slide. A wheel stand like the Next Level Racing Wheel Stand 2.0 or a GT Omega folding stand at around $150 to $200 solves the whole class of problem and folds against the wall when your partner wants the room back. This is the single purchase people most regret skipping.
Pedals next. Put them somewhere they cannot slide. The T248’s T3PM pedals have a rubber pad underneath that grips carpet but skates on hardwood, and the fix is a cheap rubber mat or, if you are using a stand, the pedal plate that comes with it. Plug the pedals into the wheel base (RJ12 on Thrustmaster and Fanatec, a proprietary connector on Logitech), not into the console. The base then presents everything to Xbox as one device.
Now the base into the console. Use a rear USB port. The front port on the Series X is fine for a controller charger but I have seen two separate T248 units drop out under load on the front port and never on the rear, and Fanatec’s own forum has a pinned thread saying the same. Power the base from its brick, wait for the wheel to finish its calibration sweep (it will spin lock to lock on its own, keep your hands off), and the Xbox will ping a “new accessory” notification.
That is it for hardware. Four minutes of work. Now the part that actually takes an hour.
The settings nobody tells you about
Firmware first. On Thrustmaster, updating requires a Windows PC; there is no way to do it from the console. The T248 shipped for months with firmware that had a slight deadzone in the centre, and the fix is a PC update. If you do not own a PC, borrow a laptop for twenty minutes, because racing with the shipping firmware on some of these is noticeably worse. Fanatec is the same story, worse, because the Fanatec PC updater has a reputation for bricking bases mid-update if you look at it wrong. Update it once, then leave it alone unless a specific fix is listed in the changelog. Logitech’s G923 is the one wheel here that has never needed an update in my experience; it does one thing and does it the same way it did in 2020.
Now, rotation. Out of the box the T248 is set to 900 degrees, the G923 to 900, and the CSL DD to whatever the rim tells it, usually 1080. That is correct for road cars and wrong for everything else. In Forza Motorsport, the game handles this per car if you leave the in-game steering rotation at the default “auto” setting, but Thrustmaster’s base has its own hardware rotation that will override it. For the T248, hold the Mode button and tap the D-pad to cycle through 270, 360, 540, 900. For GT3 and prototype racing, 540 is the sweet spot. For Formula cars, 360. Leave it at 900 for the Nordschleife in a road car and you will understand why the real thing has a big wheel.
Force feedback on Xbox is set in two places, and this is where people either give up or blow out their wrists. There is the base’s own strength (on Thrustmaster, not adjustable from the console, it is whatever the firmware ships with, effectively 100%; on the CSL DD, the tuning menu on the rim lets you set FFB strength as a percentage, and 60 to 70 percent is plenty for a 5 Nm base). Then there is the in-game gain. In Forza Motorsport 2023 the defaults are too high on the “Force Feedback Scale” and too low on “Steering Self Alignment.” My starting point on a T248: FFB Scale 65, Steering Sensitivity 50, Self Alignment 120, Mechanical Trail 100, Pneumatic Trail 100, Road Feel 60, Off-Road Feel 40. On the CSL DD, drop FFB Scale to 55 and set base strength to 65%. The goal is a wheel that goes light when the front tyres let go, which is the information that makes you faster, without the constant rattling over kerbs that a lot of beginners mistake for “immersion.”
Assetto Corsa Competizione on Xbox is stiffer. Gain at 70, Minimum Force at 5% on the belt wheels (0 on direct drive), Dynamic Damping 100, Road Effects 20. F1 25 wants Vibration & Force Feedback Strength around 70, On Track Effects at 30, and Wheel Damper at 0 or it feels like driving through treacle. In every game, if the wheel starts oscillating on its own on the straights, that is not a defect: turn the gain down or add a touch of damper. The base is fighting itself around the centre and it will keep doing it until you calm it down.
What breaks, rattles, or annoys after a week
The T248 gets hot. Not dangerously, but the top of the base is warm enough to notice after a 45-minute stint, and the fan is audible in a quiet room. Its paddles are metal and lovely; its rim buttons are plastic and slightly mushy, and the LED screen on the base is basically pointless on Xbox since most of the telemetry features only work through PC software. The clutch pedal on the T3PM set is spring-only with no travel worth mentioning, so if you were hoping for realistic launches, you weren’t getting them at this price anyway.
The G923’s Trueforce feature does work on Xbox in Forza and gives you engine vibration through the rim. Some people love it. I turned it off after three days because it drowns out the actual tyre information, which is the only feedback that matters for lap time. The G923’s gear-driven feedback also has a notchy feel around centre that Logitech has been shipping since the G25 in 2006, and at $400 in 2026 that is a hard thing to forgive when the T248 is cheaper and smoother.
The CSL DD’s problems are all about the supporting cast. The quick-release rim clamp needs a firm shove and there is a specific fear on the Fanatec subreddit about the plastic QR1 Lite wearing loose, which the metal QR2 (extra money) fixes. The Xbox-licensed rims are pricier than the PC ones for the same physical wheel. The CSL Pedals that Fanatec bundles are fine but the brake is a rubber-block spring, and about a month in you will start reading about the Fanatec CSL Pedals Load Cell Kit (around $80) which turns the brake into a pressure-sensing pedal and, I am not exaggerating, makes braking a completely different skill. If you are choosing between a 5 Nm and 8 Nm CSL DD, buy the 5 Nm and spend the difference on the load cell. The extra torque is fun for thirty seconds. The load cell brake saves you tenths every lap forever.
And every one of these wheels shares one annoyance on Xbox: no PC-style profiler. You cannot save per-game FFB profiles at the console level, so every game’s settings live inside that game, and if a title’s defaults are bad (Forza Horizon 5, which was tuned for controllers and treats a wheel as an afterthought), you fix it in that game’s menu and that game only.
How it actually feels
Forza Motorsport, Cadillac V-Series.R at Le Mans, T248 on a stand at 540 degrees. Braking into the first chicane after the Mulsanne, the wheel goes noticeably lighter as the front tyres lock, which is your cue to bleed off pedal. Through the Porsche Curves the belt drive gives you a smooth, slightly dampened sense of load building up in the front, and when you overdo it and the rear steps out, the self-aligning torque snaps the wheel back through your hands with enough conviction that you can catch it. A controller simply cannot tell you any of that.
Same car, same track, CSL DD at 65%. The difference is not more force. It is speed. The direct drive reacts to a kerb strike or a snap of oversteer maybe a tenth of a second earlier and with no belt slop, and after a week you find yourself catching slides you would previously have spun on. Whether that is worth roughly $250 more plus a stand and a rim you can use on Xbox is a fair question, and my answer is: only if you are already sure you will be doing this in a year. The T248 is not a compromise. It is a good wheel. The CSL DD is a better one.
A note on the Series S specifically
The one place the S does bite you is storage. Forza Motorsport is over 100GB, ACC with DLC is about 60GB, and the S ships with 512GB, of which about 360GB is usable. Two proper sims and you are full. The Seagate Storage Expansion Card at around $130 for 1TB is not a wheel accessory but it will be the next thing you buy, so budget it now.
FAQ
Can I use a PC wheel on Xbox Series S with an adapter? Not usefully. Adapters like the Brook or Cronus present the wheel as a gamepad, which drops force feedback and often turns the pedals into digital on/off inputs. If the wheel does not have an Xbox logo on the box, treat it as incompatible.
Does the Thrustmaster T248 work on Xbox Series S without a PC? Yes for playing. No for firmware updates. Plug it into a Windows machine once to update, then it is console-only from there.
Do I need a wheel stand or can I just clamp it to my desk? Belt wheels like the T248 and G923 are fine on a solid desk. Direct drive wheels like the CSL DD deserve a stand, because the flex in a normal desk kills the sharp detail you paid for.
Check this before you order
Look at the box or the listing and find the words “Officially licensed for Xbox.” If it says PlayStation, or says nothing, put it down. If the desk you plan to clamp to is glass, a hollow-core door, or an adjustable standing desk, add a wheel stand to the cart now rather than after your first spin. Buy the Thrustmaster T248 if you want one purchase and to be done. Buy the Fanatec CSL DD 5 Nm plus an Xbox-licensed rim plus the load cell kit if you already know this is your hobby, and skip the 8 Nm upgrade in favour of that brake. And if you are looking at a G923 at full price, look one more time at the T248 next to it and ask which one you would rather explain to yourself in six months.