Let’s talk about the Funco F9

For starters, the sand car is a blast to drive. I was so pumped when I saw that this car was being brought to the game, and still am.

But, I was expecting a wheelie monster. I was looking for this car to have really amazing traction on sand. So far, all I get is spinning into 6th gear. I watched some of the stream today when they played with the Funco and they were saying with the right tune it would wheelie like in real life. So far I’ve had no luck.

I think it would have been awesome if we got different tire options. I think stock should have come with standard sand paddles. There’s more than enough sand area in the game to justify it, it would probably be viable in snow too. The drag slicks would be amazing too just to have a bit of fun with it. Maybe PG could give the Funco this option if enough people agreed?

Anyways - has anyone had success getting this car to do standing wheelies or wheelies at speed like it should?

What tuning have you done if any? My wheelie cars all need really stiff rear suspension to get it to hop. You might need to bunnyhop it or perhaps some rollback.

Also did you do mods that gave it better front weight?

Adjusted the gearing and tire pressure, that’s really about it. I haven’t had much time yet to play around much more.

I did add the front lights, but I’ll probably take them off.

I guess I was just hoping this would be an out of the box wheelie machine like most high end sand rails are in real life. It just doesn’t have the traction for it, at least I haven’t been able to find the traction yet.

I would love to help test, but a windows update decided to BSOD me so gotta get that corrected tomorrow…

Does it breathe fire? In the picture it looks like it is breathing fire and in the cab there is a button that says fire.

Sometimes lighter rims make all the difference for wheelies.

Mine won’t do them from launch, but it pulls the fronts up off the ground on corner exit every time if I attempt to use full throttle. That required a 6 speed swap with very tall gearing, final drive of 2.2, first gear at around 3.00, with 3rd (top) gear sitting at .85. I forgot what second’s ratio is, but, use your best judgement. put it between 1 and 3 lol.
It definitely has enough power and torque to lift itself up, but I think a wheelie from launch is unlikelly unless Forza gets better sand physics and lets us throw paddle tires out back. The way it is now, it’s impossible to hit that perfect smix of grip and applied torque. As soon as it even tries to dig in, the turbos kick on and you get wheelspin. Make the gearing tall like I did and then it’s just too sluggish to really get away with it. But a paddle tire digging into a few inches of sand after a moment of wheelspin is going to have way more area in contact with another surface, making wheelies from launch not just doable, but, from what I can tell, the only reason this car exists at all

So, the 1700hp Sandcar that came with Fortune Island and said to be able to “pull standing wheelies at 60-100mph” can’t even pop a Dodge Demon wheelie. I’ve tried a multitude of different setups and tunes. Still can’t seem to get the front wheels to lift up.

Any ideas or were we lied to about what the car was capable of??

So, I’m able to get the front wheels up a tiny bit out of exits on corners if you do it just right. But that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for standing wheelies that you could hold as long as you want like it should be able to do.

PG should have given the F9 paddle tires for stock tires, and then give us the other tire options for aftermarket options. Like most things in Horizon, it’s so close to being amazing but falls short slightly of what it should be, and I struggle to understand the decision making behind not using paddle tires. It’s what makes sand rails, sand rails. The traction simply isn’t there with the normal off-road tires.

That being said, I’m still having a lot of fun driving the car. It’s my new go to for Forzathon Live events. I just wish we could pop wheelies effortlessly over bumps, after landing jumps, and even from a launch. Like mentioned above, it’s the reason these vehicles exist and are so popular.

That would’ve meant a new (and possibly more complex) tire model, wouldn’t it?

Not really? Can’t be that difficult to add paddles to a drag slick…
But also, they scan cars to get the models for the game. Don’t tell me they didn’t scan a F9 with paddle tires. It should have just been a part of the car model.

And why should creating a new tire model be the reasoning behind not giving it paddles? They have a team of developers for a reason…creating things.

I meant from a mechanical point of view. It seems potentially more complex to model the way it’d work than other tires. Mind you, I’m all for more interesting tire varieties (the Funco was particularly lacking in any tire variety).

Idk, I don’t see that being all that difficult either. I’m sure they could just go into their physics engine and crank up the grip the paddle tires would produce on sand. (I obviously don’t know exactly how that process would go…) As it stands with the standard off road tires, they just don’t cut it. Half throttle in even 4th gear and you just spin. I understand the car has 1750 hp, but these cars grip in real life even with that power.

But yeah, the fact that the F9 has no other tire options is a bit frustrating. It would be a ton of fun to throw race compound or slicks and just make the car silly. It’s not like people in real life haven’t done that before. You can easily make them road legal.

We really ought to have all tire compounds for all cars at this point. It’s a waste not to.

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I 3-starred all of the Fortune Island PR stunts with that thing, most of them first try too. It had so much power that I did one Danger Sign backwards (as in drove through the gate in the opposite direction) and still got 3 stars.

adding a paddle tire function to the game engine would be fairly simple since they already went out of their way to demarcate the various road surfaces. one would only need to increase its longitudinal friction coefficient on loosest surfaces (nearly identical to the tarmac performance difference between drag slicks snd other road tyres, but drag slicks also reduce the lateral friction coefficient and i don’t think paddles would need that on sand)

then one would only need to decrease basically ALL the friction on hard surfaces. this game is nowhere near sim enough to require modelling the paddles themselves within the physics engine although it would be fun wobbling around on the road. a simple edit to friction limits would suffice

I figured it wouldn’t be all that hard for them to do.

I really hope the team takes notice of this thread and gives us a paddle tire option or at least increases the grip of the off-road tires a great deal. It would seriously take the fun level of the Funco up a notch and give us what the car was built to do.

Anyone able to tune the F9 to do wheelies yet like the dev team mentioned was possible during the live stream?

Someone apparently has:

Thank you. However I’m not looking for just uphill wheelies over hills. More along the lines of popping them after landing a jump or ideally from a stop. With our current tire options I’m thinking it’s impossible though which is sadly unfortunate.