Corsair Acquires Trak Racer - Corsair Owns the Whole Rig Now

A couple of years ago I walked the SimRacing Expo in Dortmund and lost count of the booths. Wheelbase companies, pedal companies, cockpit companies, half of them selling nearly identical products to the same few hundred thousand customers. I told everyone who'd stand still long enough: there is no way all of these companies exist in three or four years. Some will close. The rest will get bought.

Today Corsair bought Trak Racer, and the consolidation I was talking about has properly arrived.

What actually got sold

Corsair acquired Trak Racer's assets: the cockpits, seats, monitor mounts, motion systems that Trak Racer was reselling, and the flight sim line. No price was disclosed, and with Trak Racer being a small private company, one probably never will be. Corsair's own framing tells you the plan: Fanatec is the electronics, Trak Racer is the physical simulator. Founder Matt Sten built the brand from Australia since 2008 selling almost entirely direct-to-consumer, and Corsair says the point is to change exactly that: Trak Racer on retail shelves, worldwide, through Corsair's distribution machine.

Where this ranks

Honestly, nobody outside the boardrooms knows. Corsair didn't disclose what it paid for Fanatec in 2024 and it isn't disclosing now, so anyone ranking these deals by check size is guessing. What we do know for scale: Fanatec was doing roughly $110 million in annual sales when Corsair took it over, and Asetek changed hands this spring in an $82 million deal that included its whole cooling business, not just sim racing.

Here's the difference that matters more than any price tag. Fanatec was bought out of insolvency, a distressed asset picked up from a liquidation where shareholders walked away with nothing. Trak Racer sold healthy: a profitable seventeen-year-old brand, at full strength, with a founder who chose the timing. Whatever the number was, this is the first time Corsair paid full price for a sim racing company, and you pay full price when you're sure about where a market is going.

And the concentration is the real story anyway as Corsair was one company buying one brand. Today, for the first time in this industry's history, a single owner holds top brands in two complementary categories: the electronics that make a simulator feel real, and the structure everything bolts to. Sim racing has never had a true conglomerate before. Now it does, and it's a publicly traded one with a global retail network, a supply chain that spans continents, and monitors and PCs already in the catalog.

What it means right now

Corsair is the only company in the industry that can support a 360 view of a full rig. They can build true turnkey simulators, one box, one brand, screen to seat, and put them in retail stores where a curious F1 fan can sit in one. They can hit the US market, still the biggest untapped prize in this hobby, with distribution muscle no enthusiast company can match. And they can bundle: buy the cockpit, get a deal on the wheelbase, cross-sell and upsell through an ecosystem where every product feeds the next one.

That last part is the squeeze. Every other manufacturer just got put on a timer. Moza has to step up, and to their credit they're visibly trying, shipping their first motion platform and signing the Gran Turismo partnership in the same summer. Sim-Lab answered by launching its own wheelbases last week. The middle of this market, the companies selling one product category at mid-range prices, now has to find an answer to "why buy from us when the bundle is right there," and not all of them will have one.

I think that's healthy. Competition is good, and frankly this industry had too many companies selling the same aluminum extrusion with a different sticker. Consolidation clears the field, and the survivors will be sharper for it.

Don't expect fireworks in the first six months to a year, though. We saw this movie with Fanatec: Corsair kept the headquarters, kept the staff, and changed very little publicly, and then the moves came, with Fanatec leaning harder into its own cockpit line and overhauling the customer service that had become its biggest liability. Trak Racer walks in the door in better shape on that front, their support reputation is genuinely good, so the integration should be smoother. Quiet first, then the machine starts.

Five years out

More of this. The Dortmund booth count is still too high, and now every remaining independent has watched two beloved brands choose the exit. I expect the next wave within a couple of years, and here's the part people aren't ready for: the buyers won't all be American gaming giants. Brands like Moza, which has grown from newcomer to full-ecosystem player at a pace nobody else in this industry has matched, are getting big enough to become acquirers themselves. The next consolidation headline could just as easily come from that direction.

Five years from now I think this looks like most maturing hardware markets: two or three full-ecosystem giants doing the volume, a ring of boutiques serving the enthusiasts who want the last two percent, and not much in between. More people racing than ever, better and cheaper entry points than ever, fewer logos on the grid.

I said it in Dortmund and I'll say it here: this was always coming. Today it has a name on the press release.