I am approaching 700 hours in this game. I have 100 million credits, every exclusive car since it’s release, and am a top 1,000 player accolade-point wise.
I for the love of god still cannot understand this physics “upgrade” FH5 got.
FH4 was the peak of driving physics in the series, not including midair stuff. It was genuinely great.
With FH5 I can’t take a single remotely tight corner without having to overload my brain and hand muscles with information to taking the corner perfectly.
Every car is either drastically understeery (assuming you don’t want the back end swing out) or oversteery. The physics are so slidey and it ticks me off anytime I try to do some genuine tuning or racing.
No matter how I modify my cars they’re freaking drift cars no matter what.
The only few cars that seem to have any grip are those near-undrivable S2 hypercars, and that’s only when their wheels are dug in and they’re going 200.
I have to slow down to ridiculous amounts and just every so lightly nudge my left stick if I want to take a corner in anything that’s not a million dollar AWD racecar.
I don’t have trouble avoiding spinning out, that’s fine. I have trouble being able to just simply adjust my speed and angle, tap the brakes, and line myself up to take a corner without needing to take my foot off the gas any more than I need to. Any kind of excess power I apply to the car and the back end swings out, costing me speed and time.
It genuinely ticks me off and just makes me angry. In FH4 I could build a car for grip and it would grip. Now it’s like they want every car you build to handle like it’s wheels are made of soap, god I hate this game
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To be honest I can’t really feel any difference between Horizon 4 and 5.
Are you using a wheel? I’ve got a wheel and never found it that good for racing in Horizon as once you start losing traction or sliding it’s very hard to control and the car often spins out. I have a lot better control with an Elite 2 game controller. Drifting I find is also much better with a game controller.
I’m prestige level 4 and about 120 in the accolade hall of fame so fairly familiar with the game 
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I’ve found the exact opposite honestly. Most higher-powered RWD cars were an absolute mess in FH4, especially if the roads were wet (and given that the devs took the British setting far too literally, they were basically always wet). It’s been my experience that the same cars feel much more planted in 5.
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I just drive like I always have. It felt a little different to me at first (and I liked it, particularly off-road), but I quickly stopped noticing.
The handling seems about the same as FH4 to me, maybe a little different.
My problem are the brakes. They lock-up way too easy in this game. I never locked the braked in FH4 and that was with 200% pressure.
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There is quite a big difference to Horizon 4 in terms of how the cars feel imho.
Traction levels are way higher in Horizon 5. That’s why RWD cars work on lower speeds without rear aero. In Horizon 4 everything that wasn’t very low class needed rear aero and even supercars were struggling through 90° turns. Thus, most cars were AWD swapped. The negative effect of this is the power creep of Horizon 5. We are not on Horizon 3 levels where power was everything but powerbuilds are way too easy to drive for the massive pace advantage they have.
Cornering grip felt very weird initially - especially since the controller feedback/rumble is weaker than in Horizon 4. I struggled with judging how much speed I can carry through turns. This got better with track practice, understanding the different tires & muscle memory. I still prefer Horizon 4 though. It’s more arcady here.
Braking grip. Braking is an absolute mess. Any evelation or surface change will make the tires prone to locking up. In Horizon 4 it didn’t. Braking was linear. Meaning you could brake with the same force regardless of the speed or surface/evelation and had consistent braking.
Now you have to evaluate elevation/surface, speed, mechanical & aero grip. Meaning you can brake harder at higher speeds when the aero helps and have to decrease the slower you get.
Good for a Motorsport title I guess but here I absolutely hate it.
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It’s likely the new suspension physic. In 4 and previous horizons, suspension and tire pressure setup didn’t really matter, and losing grip kind of became this arbitrary, nebulous thing that eventually happened when you pushed a car too hard.
In 5, both suspension and tire pressure matter a lot. You can’t just slap lower, tighter suspension on a car and expect the car to improve. Weight transfer matters, and if weight can’t transfer through a chassis and suspension, that’s going to translate into loss of grip.
This applies to building, tuning, and driving. If you’re in a big muscle car and you’re trying to accelerate out of a corner, but you’ve tightened the suspension to the point where the weight of your engine can’t transfer through it, it’s going to end up a slidy mess. You can compensate with throttle control, but if you’re playing on a controller with short travel on the triggers and you’re a typical player who hasn’t removed (and probably doesn’t even know about) the in-game deadzones, proper throttle control is pretty much impossible.
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It feels like elastic to me. There is a point I know the car will catch and pull itself back in. It’s better to even be on the power ever so slightly than off it even under braking or the cars can drift wide.
I love Decansor Dorado sprint because the gains are huge. There’s so much natual camber and banking in a lot of the roads, but especially there.
I couldn’t do RWD in FH4 but in FH5 it feels much more forgiving and I generally enjoy it more.
IRL camber in roads is mainly for drainage, but in FH5 it seems to have a very exaggerated effect of letting you carry more speed through and rocketing you out of the corner - pulls you right through it. You can feel how the car seems to hunker down and feel more planted, like it gains downforce.
Non-ABS braking was trickier to get a handle on as the unlevel roads mess with distribution and feel, but overall I think one thing is to get out of the habit of lifting off the power and hoping the car will FH4 itself out of trouble. You can be far more aggressive with these cars on these roads and steer the cars with powerrrr.
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I’ve never had these problems just adjust the differential settings if they’re understeering or oversteering.
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It’s something you’re about to lose when your triggers start vibrating.
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OP, here’s what made a huge difference for me using a controller:
- Set all deadzones to 0/100.
- Set steering to simulation. It’s twitchy at first but you’ll get used to it.
- Lower the tire pressure. For stock tires, use 18-25 psi depending on the vehicle. Sometimes 15 psi.
- Turn off traction control and stability control. You’ll get used to it by learning throttle discipline.
- Optional: Turn off ABS. Learn to modulate the brakes. You’ll be able to corner at higher speed.
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I dunno. The FH5 friction model works great for me. For me anyway, in FH4 it was hard to initiate a drift, and then harder to control it. The cars, particularly the older ones, were either way too loose on the back end when pushed hard, or understeered like demons. In FH5 all the cars seem to drive and drift way more smoothly and predictably, easing into a drift and recovering without drama.
The key, in my opinion, is tuning them for neutral handling, with ARB, springs, and damping. I focus on that first, on the principle that if you can’t drive them hard it doesn’t matter how much horsepower you throw at them. Once you get them handling well, it’s just a matter of throttle control, and picking your braking and turn-in points carefully.
When I add a car to my scuderia, I spend maybe an hour with it running rivals laps and curing any bad handling habits it has, and then add hp up to the top of its bracket, with chassis tuning adjustments along the way as necessary. Once I get it driving the way I like it, I go ahead and race the hell out of it.
Hmmm… I just realized how old this thread is. It’s kind of been brought back from the dead.
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