Apex One Westfield — Local services in Westfield

For starters, this spot is really cool and I’m beyond happy to have something like this in NJ. The equipment is actually great quality and feels very solid, plus the Sparco seats are fire! If you’re a bigger guy or gal, the seats are a REALLY tight fit, almost painful to sit in, but that won’t be a problem for most. Couple of things I’d point out, having a sim rig/setup of my own, the drift/rally sims didn’t have adjustable seat brackets so the pedals were too far and kinda ruined my first experience. Talking to other customers, I believe the GT3 experience rigs had adjustable seats, but if you were short (5’7 and shorter) it was still challenging to reach the pedals and for some of the tall guys the seat didn’t go back far enough. The timer for your session starts at your reserved time, but the downside is that the system doesn’t let you pick your track or car until after your timer starts, so I ended up wasting a minute and a half of my 10 minute limit trying to figure out how to select mode, car, and track and start “racing”. My specific drift/rally rig steering wheel was not aligned and needed to be calibrated (center was aimed at 10 o’clock), so another minute or two was wasted waiting for a tech/worker to come over. He attempted to reset the wheel base, but said he couldn’t calibrate it until my session was over so I actually only drove for 5-6 minutes with a crooked wheel. He had offered to give me another 5 minutes of play time after my session ended, but I couldn’t find him afterwards and didn’t want to make a fuss about it since it was grand opening day and really busy. Lastly, to my knowledge, it appears all of the rigs only run base “unmodded” Assetto Corsa. I think it would be great to see ACC incorporated for the extreme and gt zones/rigs and F1 2023 or 2024 for the F1 zones/rigs, not AC, but again just a suggestion that I assume most that are coming here won’t care about. All in all, this spot is awesome and I wish them...

This is a proper simulator center. These are not arcade games. They require care, patience, and attention and will reward you with a very accurate facsimile of driving a real car on a real track.

There are different types of simulator "chassis" which provide increasing levels of immersion via controls and also motion. The unit will swing, pitch, and bounce to mirror the behavior of the car. I suggest starting with the "F1" style chassis, which has the most modest amount of motion. Some users might experience a carsick feeling on some of the more intense chassis types.

Drivers can choose between a huge variety of tracks and cars, and can also choose different difficulty levels, which enables various driving assists or turns them off. These settings can be changed mid-game so if you choose a setting that doesn't match your ability, you are not stuck with it.

There can be some challenges getting your session started. There are a lot of moving parts in these simulators and sometimes it can require the staff to make minor adjustments. In the instances where that happened to us, the staff was able to add extra time to our session to compensate.

If you have always dreamed of driving on a race track, but don't have the money or equipment to do it for real, this is an excellent stand-in, and could also be the first steps towards doing a real track day or race.

If you are already a track day driver, you will feel very at home here, and it's a great resource for the off season, or to train on a new track you've never been to before.

BYOB, BYOF(ood), prices are very reasonable, between $20-30 per 20 minute session, depending on the chassis you choose.

Yes they have the...

I am extremely disappointed with this place. The simulators are really fun. They could use better headphones, though. The headphones kept falling off, and it really distracted me. But they are very high-quality Sims. They problem is their software and customer support. First of all, when you pay, they claim that they give you 5 extra minutes for troubleshooting. That's not true. We were setting up our accounts, and when we finally got to the sim, it said 18 minutes on my screen. We paid for 20, and they claim to give you 5 extra, so that's 7 minutes wasted. I asked the lady there before I started, and she confirmed we would be getting 25 minutes. Also, it is EXPENSIVE. We were originally going to do 40 minutes for 4 people. Then we saw the total. It said 223 DOLLARS! At that point, I might as well BUY the sim. So we went with 20. It's still expensive at 100 dollars. Here's another issue. every 3 or so minutes, it would stop the game and pit stop us. And that would usually take about a minute to process. Maybe it was a glitch because it didn't happen last time, but still. That must've happened at least 5 times. So minus another 5 minutes. That's 13 minutes. Then, at the last 5 minutes, the lady who was there SHUT OFF OUR GAME and said that we should play single-player. I got frustrated and asked her why, and she ignored me. By the time we got into a single player game, our time was up. So that is 120 dollars for 8 MINUTES OF PLAYING TIME. I am truly disappointed...