Sim racing FOV and seating position, settled

The “FOV police” on r/simracing will look at your stream and “arrest” your field of view. The top post in the genre jokingly books Formula 1 race winner Pierre Gasly for running the wrong FOV on his sim rig, and it pulled nearly 1,500 upvotes. The tone is gatekeepy, but the mechanism it points at is real: a wrong FOV costs you depth perception and consistent braking points. This page explains why the correct number works, so you can set it because you understand it.

What FOV actually is

Horizontal field of view is a pure-geometry function of two things: your screen width and your eye-to-screen distance. That is the whole input set:

hFOV = 2 × atan( (screen width / 2) / eye distance )

Resolution does not enter that equation. Monitor count does not enter it either. A creator who makes FOV videos says he gets comments weekly insisting that resolution sets the FOV. It does not, and that is the single most common myth in the topic. A 4K 27-inch screen and a 1080p 27-inch screen at the same distance want the exact same FOV number, because they are the same physical width. Pixels change how sharp the image is, not how wide the angle is.

Correct FOV makes an on-screen object the same angular size it would be through a real windshield at that distance. Match that, and depth perception, braking markers, and the sense of speed all line up with reality. That is the entire reason to set it.

Why correct FOV looks zoomed in, and why that’s the point

The first time you set the geometrically correct number, the view looks zoomed in, like your face is pressed to the windshield. Almost everyone dislikes it at first: “I’m not crazy about the correct FOV calculation” is the standard reaction. Sit with it. The narrow, zoomed feel is exactly what restores the depth cues a wide FOV flattens out. After a few sessions you stop noticing the framing and start braking at the same marker every lap, because the marker now arrives at the size and rate your eyes expect. The payoff is consistency, not comfort on day one.

Why too-wide FOV is the real trap

The “wider is better because I can see more” instinct is the trap. A wider-than-correct FOV shrinks the entire world and pushes everything into the distance. The cost is your speed sense: a too-wide FOV tricks you into thinking you are going faster than you are. Your braking markers then look smaller and farther than reality, so they arrive late, and you brake late to match a speed that is not there. Triples can push the total angle well past what a real cockpit shows you, but going wider than the geometry calls for buys immersion, not pace.

There is a credible dissent worth knowing. A minority of fast drivers deliberately run a touch tighter than correct on a single screen, because zooming in enlarges the part of the track you’re driving into and slows the apparent speed, as one much-upvoted r/assettocorsa comment puts it: “you see more of the important bits (where you are going) and it also looks slower and you have more time to think.” That works because it errs toward depth, not away from it. The trap is only ever the wide direction.

Setting FOV: the calculators and the cardboard

Every FOV calculator needs the same two numbers: screen width and eye-to-screen distance. Measure the distance, because that is the input people guess at and get wrong. “How far are you from your screens?” is the first question any FOV thread asks. Good ones:

• fovcalc.app and simracingcockpit.gg/fov-calculator for quick single-screen and triple math.
• dinex86.github.io/FOV-Calculator and sampsoid.com/fov-calc are community favorites for triples.
• SimRigBuild Screen Planner (simrigbuild.com) is the one to use when bezels and curve matter, because it does the bezel-gap and curvature math.

One thing the calculators output that trips people up: the FOV number is per sim. iRacing, ACC, and AMS2 take a degree value close to the geometric one, the F1 games roughly double it, and a few titles want radians, so a number copied off a YouTube setup for another game will be wrong. Take the angle from the calculator and enter it in the units your sim uses.

In iRacing you do not even need the website. Adjust FOV in-car with the [ and ] keys (or Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+]), fine-tune the seat in the iRacing Camera Tool at Ctrl+F12, and iRacing ships a built-in FOV Calculator in the graphics options. If you distrust software entirely, use the cardboard trick: cut a piece of cardboard the size of your screen, hold it at your real seating distance, and what you can see through that “window” is your correct FOV. The math just turns that picture into a number.

Single vs triple vs VR

These are three different problems.

• Single screen is per-screen FOV, and correct FOV crops your mirrors and the car alongside you out of frame. That blind feeling is real, so a slightly wider FOV is a fair compromise here. Pair it with a radar overlay (iOverlay radar bars) to get the side awareness back rather than cranking the number sky-high.
• Triples are total-angle FOV, and the side panels physically restore the field of view. Run the geometrically correct number; the panels mean it never feels claustrophobic. Around 700 mm eye-to-center is a common target, with the side screens angled in 45 to 60 degrees each. Full geometry is on the triple monitor setup page.
• VR has FOV fixed by the headset optics, so a Meta Quest 3 gives you what it gives you. You cannot dial it in, so do not try. Set your IPD to match your pupils and use the in-game seat move; stereoscopic depth does the job FOV tuning does on a flat screen. iRacing’s eye-tracked foveated rendering (added in 2025) is a separate performance lever for headsets that support it, not an FOV control. The triples vs VR comparison covers the tradeoff.

Curved-screen caveat

Curved monitors, including the Samsung Odyssey G9 49-inch and 57-inch super-ultrawides, render flat in-game, because the sim has no idea your panel is bent. The image projects as if the screen were a flat plane, so geometry near the curved edges is stretched relative to what the flat math assumes. There is no in-sim setting that undoes the curve, so treat the calculator number as a starting point and nudge FOV down about 5 degrees by eye until the on-track scale looks right. On curved triples the same logic applies at each bezel join; for a single curved ultrawide there is no seam, just edges that bow.

Seating geometry, settled

Most sim racers want GT/touring geometry, not the reclined formula position. Copying an F1 driver’s pedals-up, laid-back stance is a common mistake. “It’s such a difficult position to get comfortable in,” and it causes back pain for anyone not deliberately racing open-wheel with load-cell pedals braced against the seat. The settled GT numbers:

• Seat back around 45 to 55 degrees, with the seat bottom around 30 degrees so you are not sliding forward.
• Pedals roughly level with your hips.
• Elbows near 90 degrees with hands at 9-and-3, wrists neutral.
• Hamstrings fully supported along the seat bottom.

Ricmotech’s method, measuring knee height to a false floor, is a clean way to get the pedal-to-hip relationship repeatable.

Wheel height and distance

Set the wheel so your arms have a slight bend at 9-and-3, never locked straight. The drape test: rest a wrist over the top of the rim with your shoulders back against the seat; if your wrist reaches the top comfortably, the distance is right. A wheel too far out forces you to reach and strains the shoulders.

Pedal angle and height

Raising and angling the pedal face only helps with a load-cell brake, where you brace your leg and push with real force (Moza, Simagic, and similar). On potentiometer or hall pedals you push by travel, and tilting them up just adds knee strain for nothing. Keep your heel on the floor or a heel rest. More on this in pedals: ergonomics and inverted decks.

Monitor height and horizon

Center the screen horizontally on the wheel and put the top third at eye level so the horizon lands at your eye line. Keep the panel close to perpendicular to the floor, with your eyes near its vertical middle; a screen tilted back or mounted too high makes a flat road read as a hill and pushes your sense of the horizon off. The most common rig fault is a monitor mounted too high, which makes you look up at it and strains the neck. You want to be sitting up to the wheel and looking straight ahead.

Order of operations

Build the rig from the body out, and set FOV last: seat, then pedals, then wheel, then monitor, then FOV. Each step depends on the one before it, and your final seating distance is the number the FOV calculator needs, so there is no point computing FOV until the seat is locked. If you are tall, heavy, or fighting pain, the seats and rig ergonomics page has the specific fixes.