Hey, i’ve just started tuning in forza horizon 2, and by now i think i’ve got it pretty much figured out. I have read many posts, tutorials, instructions, articles about tuning in both forza and real life, and i can safely say my cars are quick. Yet i am hungry for more. I guess it’s the nature of the game to always go faster.
What i would lile to know is what is something that you do when you build a car, something that you know works. Whether it be a trick on rwd cars or front engined or whatever. What are your tuning pet peeves, for example not putting front suspension higher in front than rear, or if you do, why and under what circumstances?
Really what i’m looking for are bits and pieces of information or tuning success stories. What single piece of tuning advice would you give someone, who thinks got it figured out to surprise him.
Also when i’m saying tuning, I mean for circuit or sprint races, not for cruising or drag or drift.
I’m really looking for something new to either confirm or challenge the way I approach tuning in fh2 and, hopefully, Forza 6
I’ve like to use very low pressure in my tires. It seems to make launches faster and you get more traction than if you use “proper” pressures.
I usually use 15 psi in the front and rear. Some cars understeer even after you’ve adjusted the ARB’s and springs and dampers and differential to give you oversteer. If you’ve tried adjusting all those things and the car isn’t handling as expected, it probably just needs the pressure to be different in the tires - in this case, I increase the front pressure until the 0-60 or 0-100 time drops. The same is true if you need more understeer (increase the rear pressure instead).
If you tune a car for oversteer but get understeer it may be due to front end body roll. If I try arb of 1/40 and it understeers then I often use 14/40 and get my turning from somewhere else.
To the poster that says tunes may get a second, think again.
Whilst build and driving are critical there is such a thing as a tune that simply can not take fast driving.
Also turning ability and instability are not the same thing.
To run a really quick lap you need to be confident the car can handle it and the car needs to handle it.
For me if the tune is not quite right and can not handle the speeds I want to get out of it then I literally need to back off or if I choose to keep pushing the car may lose control. So for me a tune can be multiple seconds simply because I can really pound the thing.
Some people find my tunes unstable. Well that is what they call it. Thing is if you drive them quicker they don’t seem so unstable. They are tuned to turn well at high speed. Go too slow or turn too early etc and they will seem twitchy or unstable. Yet I find them glued to the road.
How do you make a car turn better? examples are low front ARB, high rear, high front aero / low rear etc etc. Some will say - but that makes it unstable. Not if you have the full tunr setup to handle it eg low springs, right amount of camber etc.
This is the best advice I’ve seen on tire pressures. Usually people get this backwards. I also make my tire pressures different as a last resort to generate understeer or oversteer…after exhausting all other options.
And I set mine low too. Not 15. But usually 18-19. I guess they heat up faster in all these short races.
One thing I don’t see talked about much is wheel diameter. Typically, increasing front wheel diameter makes a car better able to handle bumpy terrain. Smaller diameter increases turn-in response.
The thing I love about this game is that you can’t build a single car to do everything well. You have to decide what you want to sacrifice to boost performance in other areas. It’s pretty awesome.
I like this topic. I have a ton of top 30-50 cars but can’t get over the hump into the truly elite and wonder what guys like Don Joewon Song and ERS Starchy know that I don’t. Will ruminate and revisit this thread…
Don and Starchy both use tunes that are different (Sometimes) than the ones they share. It all depends on the car and the track as well - you can have a very good build and tune that is good all around and be in the top 50 everywhere, but if you want to get the very top times you need to spend some time getting a car just right for that particular track.
I don’t know about lowering the tire pressure too much, I typically keep it in the twenties…
It would be nice to get some tips and tricks for tuning from the really, really good and fast tuners but I think what makes them so fast isn’t necessarily the tuning and building. Sure, some of them tune their own cars but sometimes if you’re in a club that really gets into it a couple people that are really good at it make and share the tunes so everyone can use them. It’s all about using the car to the best of its potential with how you drive it and that’s what separates those on top from the rest.
Yeah, adjusting a car for a particular track is most likely the key to elite times. Ugh. I just don’t have the patience for that, so I build the best all-around car I can. How much of a difference do you think manual w/clutch makes versus just manual? You’ve probably answered that question 1000 times, but I’ve never bothered to learn how to drive manual w/ clutch. Maybe when that new super controller is released that has the levers on the back. Have you seen that controller? Seems perfect for manual w/ clutch.
I find the biggest difference comes from what kind of driving and braking lines you take, but down the wire I do believe tunes will eke you the .5 to 1 second you sometimes need.
I will definetly try tardii’s tip. After all it’s exactly the kind of tips I was looking for. Just need to check now and see if it works for me and my driving style. Thank you Tardii.
I guess i should be sharing as well: i barley ever use arb’s and when I do i only install rear arb’s. I find it creates (no matter the tune on them) too much understeer. On some cars the roll is really too excessive and then i put rear arb’s which solves half the problem. Often the body roll in the front will create a dip that’s desirable (to me) to get into turns, while the rear stays planted and gives me the grip I need to power out. Maybe PPi has some key advice to add to this as I know he likes to use them.
Dude, sometimes I’ve shaved 5-6 seconds just by adjusting gear ratios. Now maybe if I had kept the stock transmission I wouldn’t have needed to adjust ratios in the first place, but that’s just an example of shaving a lot of time with tuning.
Obviously you can shave a lot more than .5 or 1 second. I’ve cut down over 12 seconds on some tracks with the proper tune. What i meant is really sometimes you change a tiny thing such as .5 camber and cut some time. Really minute detas over an already pretty solid tune
Manual versus Manual with clutch - I think that any differences that will make are more closely observed on the Motorsport side of things as opposed to Horizon. Yes it’s quicker, yes you get some more control of the vehicle, but honestly you can set top 100 times in Horizon with automatic and still be just fine. I think in this game it’s really more of a preference thing.
Sometimes the tune does make all the difference time wise. Last night I decided to experiment some more with some of the tips I’ve received from Eduardo over time and figured - clearly he’s fast so he has to be right about it, perhaps I’m just not extreme enough. I made some tweaks and found the car was amazing. It was just little tuning things but it made it feel like a completely different car. It also dropped my lap time on that particular circuit by 4.2 seconds (I didn’t change the gearing). It’s definitely something to try - and as I hypothesised; I wasn’t extreme enough.
Then again, my PB on this circuit wasn’t that good to begin with because I don’t race it much and the car wasn’t nearly as good beforehand. Sure, I’m quicker with the new tune but we’ll see where I settle in once I practice the track a bit more.
As for the challenge, I wouldn’t mind doing that - it sounds fun. I’d suggest picking a car and then limiting the class to the top of it’s current class or the top of the next highest class - depending on stock PI. B or A class would be fun.
I think it would be interesting to guess how others built the car and then see how much of that guess is either right or wrong. I’m sure there would be plenty of surprises and we’d all learn a thing or two.
**Car:**Because it’s the car I’ve been playing with for a bit these last few days I’d say the Shelby Daytona Coupe would be fun to do in A or S1. If we stick to what I said above then A but really I’m fine with either.
**Track:**Since this is a circuit tuning thread the track ought to be a circuit. Vitesse is fun but it really only has three corners. There’s the one track in Nice-Massena that is right on the boardwalk near the end of town (towards the docks) that is a fun little track and I’d like that one.
You should see my latest Shelby Daytona Coupe tune. The S1 build I have shared is well received and I really like it but after going extreme it is, as I said, like a whole new car.
I use ARBs for the same reasons PPI mentioned. I like to keep them soft, though. I think soft handles better in the rain and on bumpy track and adequately enough everywhere else. I almost always set my rear higher than my front, something like 7 front, 20 rear on AWD.
I do use arbs in the front a lot because I find that the stock settings are either non-existent (no factory arbs) or too high. By installing the front arb I can lower it.
What I actually go without on some cars are the springs. You do get a lot of tuning options from them but some cars are set up fairly well stock. If something is good, why try to change it and potentially make it worse. Don Joewon Song did this for the royal flash video in b class and Big W0rm 80 with his b class '05 WRX I believe. This does depend on the class though.
One thing I’m interested in is the damping settings once you install springs. I understand what they do in the game and how to tune then to produce a wanted change but I still know they’re my weakest area. what’s a good place to start? What changes do you want to see when you tune them? Are there certain things you should look to other parts to fix or can they be changed by tuning the damping settings?
As far as i’m concerned, the damping is never above 9, mostly around 8-8.5. The rebound (the lower setting on the screen, cant recall if it’s bump or rebound) is as suggested by the description about 45% -50% as stiff, so normally around 4-4.3 and it seems to work very well.
I would also like to hear another opinion, as I just go with those settings because they work, but couldnt fix if they were not or could not recognise it it they weren’t (if you know what i mean) Also if I tune a car for offroad I will make them softer by about 1 point, also i will add arbs. They seem to make a huge difference when it comes to off-road
Never above 9? For circuit I am almost never as low as 9 (for circuit racing and maybe half that for cross country.
Bump around 4? I use approx half of that.
PPI said default springs? I cut a few hundred pounds off that.
For circuit tuning the best tips I can give is take a look at open source tunes on the FM5 forums but make sure you are looking at a fast tuner. ONR Roadrunner uses some settings people should take a look at.
In short try extreme settings to see what happens.
but really I’m fine with either.