I'm pretty new to SD, but I think you always need to set up what control device your named driver uses. Or it might default to keyboard. I don't know, but does your wheel show up in the player's device configuration? It's the furthest right button under the list of player names box. Looks like 4 arrow keys.
Only other thing I can think of is; if you have two devices which the system thinks are joysticks, perhaps it picked up the wrong one. You should be able to choose which one to use though, I would think. You can see how many 'joysticks' are connected by looking in /dev/input/ for js0 entries.
You can also test joysticks by running 'jstest /dev/input/js0'.
Hoping it helps. Don't give up. It's a great game.