if you're going into serious racing, may I recommend the Logitech G25. My brother has, great wheel. He had a problem with and so contacted Logitech and they sent him a brand new one. All he had to do was send his old power adapter to one of their offices in Germany after he got the wheel :P
An idea that works with the stuttering cores, I had to go to task manager, right click on you left 4 dead 2 and hit set affinity and then uncheck one of the boxes. This fixed my issue on left 4 dead as it would keep stuttering. It will make the game playable till they fix it