Do you love sim racing enough to spend $2,499 on a steering wheel?

Sim-Lab has just released a new $2,499 steering wheel that is said to be a “as authentic as possible” replica of the wheels Lewis Hamilton uses to drive the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team’s race cars. It’s a pretty sight to behold, but a reminder that getting involved in simulators can be dangerous for your budget.

If that price tag leaves you speechless, don’t bother picking it up. You can’t just plug the wheel into your PC and drive around the simulated streets of Montreal. It has to be attached to a wheelbase, which translates the wheel’s rotational movements and button inputs into a racing game while providing force feedback. Those can also cost you several thousand dollars, and none are included with this wheel.

Why is Sim-Lab’s new steering wheel so expensive? For starters, it’s officially licensed by Formula 1 team Mercedes-AMG Petronas, which has shared the computer-aided design (CAD) data it uses to build the steering wheels for its multi-million dollar cars. Sim-Lab’s wheel is the closest thing we’ll get to racing a steering wheel without replacing Lewis Hamilton as the team’s driver when he moves to Ferrari next year.

The steering wheel body is also made of a hand-crafted carbon fiber shell. This not only allows it to weigh 1,240 grams, but also to be extremely rigid, so that the vibrations and resistance provided by the wheelbase are accurately transmitted to a player’s hands. It won’t creak or flex when you’re heading into a simulated corner at over 240 km/h.

The steering wheel features nine rotary dials, 12 buttons, two switches, carbon fiber paddle shifters, anti-static silicone rubber grips, and 25 controllable RGB LEDs that provide telemetry data at a glance. If that data isn’t enough, the center of the wheel also features a 4.3-inch LCD screen with data layouts that match what Mercedes F1 drivers see.

To most of us this may seem like obscene madness, but for racing sim fans striving to recreate an authentic F1 experience, the only thing that seems to be missing is race engineer Bono telling them “Okay Lewis, it’s hammer time”.