A Couple of Simple Tuning Questions

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I have read this forum and Worm’s brilliant tuning guide. I spent pretty much an entire day playing with a single tune, which was a whole load of fun and a bit frustrating all at the same time. In the end I improved upon a downloaded tune I was using for the Ferrari F50 with my own and on Yas Marina South, I improved my laptime by 3seconds, so hats off to Worm and all those that contributed to the information I was reading on the weekend.

My background is F1 racing games and they’ve moved away from sim physics and tunes/setups quite a few years back, you can basically setup a car in F1 20XX with a standard setup and it’ll work for most of the circuits. So Forza to my surprise is quite a bit more advanced than this, I like it :slight_smile:

Anyway, during my process of setting up a tune I came up with the following questions, fairly simple for most of you guys, but being new to the physics and interface of Forza not so straight forward for me:

  1. How do you definitively know if your car is bottoming out?
    I’m playing with ride height which should be as simple as go as low as you can til it bottoms out, but there is no indication I can tell of how far the car is off the deck in the telemetry, or no known visual indicators. I created a tune purely based on changing the height til my lap times started to be adversely affected. Which is ok, but seeing as it takes 3 laps for tyres to warm up, was quite time consuming.

  2. In Worm’s guide he has references to the Spring settings and what action to perform in different stages of a corner. He had listed “Slow Corner Entry”, “Slalom or Full Throttle Entry”, “Slalom or Full Throttle Exit”, “Apex to Exit”, “Decreasing Radius/Trail Braking”. I’m wanting clarification on these as I’m struggling to get my head around it, my understanding is:

Slow Corner Entry: A corner that you approach at relatively low speed, might follow a previous corner (without being a “slalom” corner), e.g. Yas Marina, the corner before the big back straight…

Slalom or Full Throttle Entry: This one I’m a little confused, is this suggesting A) that its all 4th or higher geared corners? Or B) relation to approach speed? E.g. Yas Marina, A) The right hand sweeping bend before the zig zag approaching the back straight OR B) the end of the back straight?

Slalom or Full Throttle Entry: So given that corners come in many shapes and sizes, is this in relation to the above stated corner, or is it in relation to a type of exit to a corner? I.E. You can have a corner with a slow entry but it could be a long sweeping bend which may turn this into a slalom corner?

Apex to Exit: I take this to mean, on a normal corner, the point of the Apex until you complete the turn.

Decreasing Radius/Trail Braking: I take this to mean any corner that requires some form or braking during the entry, when you normally would finish braking before turning.

  1. In relation to Spring/Damper tuning, when does a car shift from “understeer” to “boating” or “oversteer” and “sliding”? I got so focused on damper settings that when I was holistically reviewing my car, the whole thing was sliding, or is that the trick, that when you tweak dampers/springs/arb settings that you’re constantly looking for sliding/boating/understeer/oversteer? Ultimately it would be great if some of the telemetry actually helped identify this as well, don’t suppose I missed anything that helps with this?

  2. In what order should I tune the car? I was playing around with springs/dampers before I touched ARB and Alignment settings and found that anytime I touched the ARB and Caster settings that I found it far better with the original settings? I thought to myself that I should of done ARB and Alignment settings first, but then thought that I would invariably would have to change Springs/Dampers at the same time, but I like to be scientific and make one or two changes at a time and measure the results.

  3. Friction Telemetry is pretty, but does it mean anything pertinent to Camber and Toe settings? I was trying to make heads and tales of what the line means and whether it shows a better contact patch or not.

  4. Spring Telemetry, watching the car bounce around is nice, but again, should I be aiming to keep the range as close to the middle marker or not?

PS Sorry for the long winded post, I am terrible on forums, I feel the need to explain myself, feel free to tackle one or questions only :stuck_out_tongue:

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  1. Look at telemetry

  2. As you feel.
    I usualy have a “pre-made” setup that I almost always do (Tire to 28 psi, set the gearing to an acceptable ratio, spring height, Brake and differential)
    From there I drive the car see how it feel and adjust accordingly.

  3. You’ll have info on camber in another telemetry page. Toe should stay the same.

  4. It shouldnt reach the top or the bottom line, but focusing on keeping as close a possible to the center, you need to keep in mind to balance the front and the rear of the car.

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I had a good look and couldn’t find anything about the ride height in the telemetry, don’t suppose you know which page I should be looking on, from memory there is general info, tire temps, tire/camber info, g force meter, damage indicator.

I thought it only stated the camber value, or is this something that is dynamic and I should be trying to keep it within a certain boundary?

Cheers for the response…

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I think you’ve asked some really good questions and I too await to see some of the responses…I have noticed, if you test your car from an outside the cockpit view, you can see it bottom out, there will be sparks come out from under neath the rear of the car. The rest I look forward to seeing how those issues are addressed as they would be helpful to me as well.

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  1. The telemetry won’t tell you if your bottoming out anymore. You have to look from the chase view if your seeing sparks, listen for a rubbing or scraping sound or any loud bangs.

3&4. I set the tire pressure, camber/ caster, springs, brakes and diff first. Run a few laps check the tire pressure the run another. If you notice the car sliding too much adjust the springs again and make a lap or so. Begin adjusting the ARB run a few laps and adjust if needed. Then start checking the rebound and bump. Run more laps and adjust as needed.

I was told by Worm in another post to ignore the telemetry completely. It isn’t as accurate in this game as it was in FM4. Just check tire pressure and temps.

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I tune mostly by “butt feel” Although I’m still tuning only in FM4 as I don’t have FM5 yet. How ever What I have heard from my friends who play FM5, it’s almost same thing so my reply would pretty close to correct answer.

  1. How do you definitively know if your car is bottoming out?
    I’m playing with ride height which should be as simple as go as low as you can til it bottoms out, but there is no indication I can tell of how far the car is off the deck in the telemetry, or no known visual indicators. I created a tune purely based on changing the height til my lap times started to be adversely affected. Which is ok, but seeing as it takes 3 laps for tyres to warm up, was quite time consuming.

Look at suspension telemetry. When you go over bumps if some of the bars flashes red, it bottomed out.

  1. In what order should I tune the car? I was playing around with springs/dampers before I touched ARB and Alignment settings and found that anytime I touched the ARB and Caster settings that I found it far better with the original settings? I thought to myself that I should of done ARB and Alignment settings first, but then thought that I would invariably would have to change Springs/Dampers at the same time, but I like to be scientific and make one or two changes at a time and measure the results.

Personally, I start by setting the alignment to somewhat decent figures, Camber and Caster for starters and return later for toe, Then I think a bit of the track is it bumpy (sebring 1st and last corner)
Is it flat (yas marina) Does it have big elevation changes (alps) Do I ride many kerbs (sebring).

For flat track I set the rideheight low and suspension fairly soft. and bump and rebound stiffness fairly stiff (for bump, this is still fairly low we are talking on 2.5-5.0 bump stiffness) Adjust as long as the suspension telemetry gives me only 1 or two red flashes around a lap, and at other times (cornering, running over a kerb, etc) it reaches to this almost.
If its bumpy track where I ride lots of kerbs, go over bigger bumps, etc. I raise that car bit higher, stiffen the suspension a bit, and soften rebound and bump stiffness.
At the end of the day, I’m aiming to set the car so that what ever I do the chassis would go rather smoothly in all conditions, and suspension would work over all the bumps and humps on the road.
I also bring the ARB’s in this. The lower I’m going the stiffer the ARB has to be so that it wouldn’t let the car bottom out in long high speed sweepers (like in indy GP)

Now I set the aero. The aero doesn’t affect too much on low speeds (less than 100kmh/60MPH) but it affects on straights and highspeed corners, To let my car go as fast as possible, on the straight the aero must be low as possible, but when I get to make trough those sweepers as close to full throttle as I can I must set it higher, Therefore I run the corners and adjust accordingly.
If I have to run higher aero profile it gibes more “weight” to the car, so I might have to check again at the suspension, and stiffen it a bit.

Then all the rest what is left here,
Gears, Usually I tend to run sport or stock gearbox, but if I have race gearbox, I tend to set the gears so that I can do 99% of shifting on straights. Then again, you never should shift in corner or right after that, just because it sends always a little pulse (accelerating or decelerating) trough the driveline, which might unsettle the car.
Tire pressure, unless I have adjusted it by now Set it on 33 PSI on hot tires.
Brakes, so that I front and rear lock up at the same time (friction telemetry).

Differental setting have changed so much berween FM4 and FM5 (according to my understanding) that I won’t tell too much about it without testing.
How ever, lower settings helps the car rotating under acceleration and deceleration. While higher setting tend to keep the car going more to a straight line.
You want to floor the throttle as early as possible, and higer setting wants to lock the wheels together, so there would be less wheelspin. How ever, if it locks up too early it will cause you to understeer off the track, or if you had enough power you just cause both tires to lose grip, and that causes oversteer, or complete spinout.
How ever, in FWD cars, you might want fairly high acceleration differential, just to keep you from spinning one tire on acceleration.

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Ok, from what I’m hearing then I have to run chase cam or listen out for scraping.

I like your method Rabbit, it almost fits with what I was doing.

Explains a lot of issues I was having with the figures coming out of the telemetry, I spent a good 1.5 hours on tyre temps until I just decided to focus on psi/bar :wink:

I was looking last night and there is definitively no indication on any of the telemetry either of ride height or of what you described on FM5. Unless I’m cursed by having a male look for it :wink:

This whole bit is gold, cheers Jugger…