I’m a sim racer with a passion for Motorsport, good racecraft and the tech side of sim racing. I made SIMRACINGCOCKPIT.GG as a place to share my experiences. I hold an International Class C race licence and write for sim racing store G-Performance and Motorsport resource Driver61.com
Fanatec is by now the most prolific sim racing equipment vendor on the planet. Most of their users absolutely love them, with a huge following of enthusiasts ready to help on Facebook, Reddit, and a myriad of other social channels, including Fanatec’s very own Forum.
But if you’re new to sim racing and you’re looking to build your first cockpit, how do you get yourself a deal? Is there actually such as thing as a discount coupon code for Fanatec? Do they ever offer free shipping? Does Fanatec ever have sales? What’s a “bundle”?
Fanatec is known to rarely if ever, create discount vouchers on their products. With the well-known exception of course being Black Friday. And if you’re looking for coupons prepare to be disappointed – Fanatec hasn’t issued a coupon code since 2019!
But please don’t be disheartened. It’s never impossible to find a deal! Read on to get some tips from me on how to find a discount on Fanatec sim racing gear.
The classic forum question: Does the voucher code entry field ever get used?
If you are in the checkout process on Fanatec.com, a voucher code entry field can be seen at the bottom of the basket page:
This probably causes a lot of people to go voucher code hunting! Anyone offering coupon codes, discounts, or “deal trackers” is really just parroting whatever is already listed on the Fanatec website and, naturally, is already available to absolutely everyone. Like this website, they get a commission for the click so they’re motivated to get your attention.
As MajorWolf72 on the Fanatec Reddit states in very plain terms: There are no Fanatec discount codes. Ever. There’s Black Friday and that’s it.
So how do I find discounts from Fanatec or on Fanatec equipment?
I’ve got a bunch of strategies for you, with my personal favourite strategy just to use Google in the right way. For the uninitiated, Google has what we call operators – additional items you can bolt on to a query to find something you’re looking for.
In this case, we’re searching the Fanatec website with site:fanatec.com. We’re looking for the telltale discount text “you save” and removing the forum from the results:
The result is quite handy, a list of all the pages currently offering a discount by matching the text “you save”.
In this example, we’re going a step further by looking for discounts on the USA website:
For the technically minded
If you’re a web developer or just technically minded (like most sim racers are!) then take a look at this page source code:
You could use an XPATH scraper to periodically crawl the website looking for the emergence of a CSS class: class="price--delta" which is the CSS style Fanatec use to highlight a discount on their website.
Tools to track web page changes for the non-developer
If you’re not a developer and/or don’t want to build a scraper, website change monitoring tools like Visualping.io can periodically check a page for changes; and, using their text change detection you can set the tool up to alert you to the addition of the discount text, “You save” on a product page:
This handy little Chrome plugin can monitor for changes using your browser, so conditions such as a discounted price or a change because of a promotional offer going live should be easy to catch. These techniques come in very handy for monitoring for GPUs coming in and out of stock too.
Fanatec Bundles
There are also always bundle offers to be had, for example, you’ll save yourself some cash if you buy the CSL pedals and Boost kit with the Fanatec CSL DD.
In the end, it might be worth waiting and watching – especially in the late Spring and Summer months when typically, the sim racing industry rests (no one seems to want to buy simulator gear when there’s a heatwave, who knew?).