WRC Wheel not working after the 451 Driver/Firmware update
David Alter
Member
I've installed 451 driver/firmware and it installs fine on the wheel base and the Fanatec control panel sees the wheel base. However, there is an issue when I connect the WRC wheel. The process and findings: With the wheel connected, the Fanatic Control panel app will not show any Fanatec devices giving me a "no fanatec device found error" and the wheel will show a red light and two red bars. When attempting to manually update the wheel firmware, it says it loads the new firmware successfully but within a few seconds, the wheel will once again show a red light with two red bars and cause the Fanatec control panel to no longer recognize the wheel base and gives me the "no fanatec device found" error
If I roll back to the 450 Firmware using the update Firmware process and install the rolled back 450 driver the issue persists.
I've tried both 451 driver/firmware updates. One being the first one in this thread and the other being the download package from the main fanatec driver page. No success with either. I have now attempted to reinstall the 451 driver/firmware after attempting the 450 driver/firmware rollback, now the WRC wheel does not show any lights (does not show the red light with the two red bars) but the same issue persists with the "no fanatec device found error" in the Fanatec control panel. At present the wheel is not working and the wheel base shows the variable power light indicating there is an issue. The wheel base is fine when the wheel is not connected.
How do we proceed/fix after encountering this failed driver/firmware update? It is both a new wheel base, wheel and a dedicated computer for the SIM, all less than 30 days old. This is being installed on a new Windows 11 64 bit PC with an RTX480 graphics card and an intel i7 processor using the Fanatec supplied USB cable.
In each instance of changing the driver/firmware (after the first failed attempt from the 450 to 451 package), I removed the prior driver, power cycled the wheel base, rebootted the computer, and then installed the new driver/firware update.
In my youth, I built PC's,. I am not an expert but I am far from a novice in how to install softare, drivers, firmware, and recover from errors. This has me stumped. Please advise on how to resolve this issue.
Comments
This is clearly a hardware issue and you need to contact the support.
My issue has been resolved after contacting Fanatec support. As it turns out, my QR adapter had moved out about 1/16th of an inch. That kept the USB plug on the inside of the QR adapter from making contact on all pins. Since the clamp was secure and since it was only 1/16th of an inch pulled out, it was not noticable to me. Fanatec support asked for video of the issue and my rig. They spotted that there was a possibility that my QR adpater was possibly not inserted as far as necessary. I doubted this to be the issue since the issue I was facing occured concurently with an update to the 451 firmware and my QR adapter seemed to be properly installed. However, to be thorough, I photographed the clamp and QR adapter, then loosed the clamp, removed the QR adapter, inspected the USB plug on the inside, reinserted the QR adapter, re-torqured the clamp to 15 nm, and then installed my WRC wheel. It instantly worked without issue. I then compared the installation to the photo I took before going through that excercise and could see that my QR adapter was roughly 1/16 inch out of position initially. So, there were no hardware issues and no software issues. I suggest anyone having a problem don't assume your QR adapter is making proper USB contact. Remove the clamp, inspect, reinstall, and then re-torque the clamp to 15 nm. You will not see that the QR adapter is out of position. You need to confirm that it is fully inserted as far as possible before proceeding to later diagnostics.