Asetek Speeds Up Sim Racing Hardware Design with SOLIDWORKS

Asetek Racing was founded to solve a thermal problem. As CPUs and GPUs ran hotter, the company set out to cool them with liquid. Today, its engineers face a different challenge: building racing hardware that puts drivers as close to the real thing as possible.

That shift began with a community project. Asetek launched a “gaming academy” for local kids and bought five racing simulators. The software and customer service were poor, and the hardware made it hard to run all five at once. CEO and founder André Sloth Eriksen recalls asking himself whether Asetek could do it better. Asetek Racing™ is the answer. Designed and engineered in Denmark, the product range spans direct drive wheelbases, steering wheels, pedals, button boxes and cockpits, from the entry-level Initium™ system to the Forte® and Invicta™ lines. All of it is developed in SOLIDWORKS® Design, which Asetek has used for around 20 years.

Designing for the Real Race Feeling

Asetek doesn’t just want to match competitors. “We really try to mimic the real race feeling,” Eriksen says. That ambition shows in the hardware, including a real hydraulic brake cylinder that can handle 200 bar of pressure, and in details like a quick release that carries both data and power through a single connection when the steering wheel is attached.

Delivering that realism takes constant mechanical engineering, and speed matters. Mechanical engineer Mads Mørup Schjoldager says surfacing and organic shapes are his favorite parts of SOLIDWORKS Design, because “you can quickly get my thoughts out of my brain and into the software.”

How Asetek Moves from SOLIDWORKS Design to Prototype in a Week or Two

Asetek models everything in SOLIDWORKS so it can move directly from design to prototyping, whether through 3D printing, SLS or CNC machining. “That is one of our competitive edge[s],” Eriksen says. “We can go into prototypes immediately.”

The same workflow connects engineers with the people running the machines. Production can request small tweaks or make them directly in their own SOLIDWORKS Design version, which keeps the shop floor more effective. The result is pace. “We are coming with new ideas very fast, so I try to draw them up very fast,” Schjoldager explains. “In a matter of weeks, a week or two, we could have a new product.” The team can run “5 or 10 iterations just in one day.”

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Confirms What Testing Finds

SOLIDWORKS Simulation is a big part of Asetek’s design phase, and one case shows why. On the company’s first steering wheel, the paddle shifters made it through development with an issue the team hadn’t seen. Dynamic testing revealed stress concentrations in one area of the paddle.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation had pointed to the same place. “Exactly where the simulation software said the stresses were highest is where we had the first fracture,” Schjoldager says. “The forces are more or less identical to what we saw in the simulation software.”

Armed with that data, the team redesigned the part with a thicker plastic section and a rib extended up the paddle to spread the load, removing the stress concentrations in the final design.

SOLIDWORKS Support and AI Plans at Asetek’s team also point to the people behind the software. “Getting access to good support and fast support is paramount,” Eriksen says. The team has worked with its SOLIDWORKS partner for a long time, and a training session earlier this year gave them a preview of features in newer versions.

Asetek is also looking forward to AI capabilities in SOLIDWORKS as another way to move faster through prototyping. For a company built on innovation, the goal is simple. “We want to win,” Eriksen says. “And I think having that drive is super important.”