Car randomly jerks to the left?

Troubleshooting Hub Legacy Troubleshooting Legacy Motorsport Issues
1

I noticed on Xbox one while using a controller randomly, maybe two times a lap my car will just jerk to the left. Somehow it keeps getting triggered to turn to the left as hard as possible, and once I turn right it is corrected.

I am using a refular controller, and have never experienced this. I thought maybe my controller is just broken, so I tried out fh3 and fm6 and it never happens in those games. I don’t have an extra controller to try it out to see if it’s the controller.

Before I go out and buy a new controller, anyone have any ideas on what it could possibly be? I was curious if this has happened to anyone else on fm7? It just seems odd to me it is occurring on this game and no others games.

2

Is this while cornering, in straight line, while accelerating, not accelerating, braking? A little more details please.

3

It has happened at just about any time during a race.

It isn’t far most noticeable when driving in a straight line though. No wet spots on the road or anything, and just out of the blue it will jerk to the left. It’s not that the car is losing grip from accelerating or decelerating. I thought that st first it might have been loss of traction or torque steer but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

4

I’ll probably end up buying a new controller to see if that fixes it tomorrow but it’s just super annoying it’s only on this game.

5

Weird. Might not be a controller issue if it’s just this game but, I guess that’s worth a try.

6

maybe try and up your inside steering deadzone a little if you got a low number or and old controller.

1 Like
7

I ran into this exact problem this morning on my PC. I normally play with a wheel, but the FFB makes enough noise that it’d wake up others in the house, so I had the wheel unplugged and was just using the controller. Just as OP described, the on-screen wheel would violently jerk to the left for a split second, though I don’t think I had to steer right to fix it. It’s hard to tell, as I reflexively would try to turn right to correct, so I can’t really say whether it was corrected by me turning right or if it had already corrected.

It happens in any situation and not consistently. I was doing some of the showcase events, it happened repeatedly every lap when I was doing the classic grand prix cars at Mugello, happened maybe once when I did the autocross with the Bronco, not at all on either of the first two bowling events, and then didn’t happen for the first two laps of the Porsche GT1 at Silverstone but then happened repeatedly once I hit lap three.

I’m using the in-car view and can see the onscreen wheel turn most/maybe all of the way to full left lock, then quickly back to center. I’ve got the steering set to “Normal”, and usually it’s significantly dampened. I.e., if I actually yank the stick hard to the left on the controller, the steering wheel won’t turn all that far by the time I let it go. It’s a pretty gradual motion on screen and actually takes a while to get to full lock. This is almost instantaneous hard lock, then almost instantaneous back to normal. That’s what makes me think it’s not a malfunctioning controller, as purposely turning hard left doesn’t make the onscreen wheel or car react the same way it does when this happens. The controller is reasonably new, from May of this year, and doesn’t get used all that much. The USB receiver for the controller is even newer, maybe a month old.

This hadn’t happened to me previously, though I’ve only played with a controller one other time. That was doing the Corvette endurance showcase at Spa, so there was plenty of time for the issue to show up, but it didn’t.

8

If I’d have to guess…youre controller is going to break soon.

If you’ve had it 1 year, it’s time for a new one for Forza. It’s usually not noticeable in other games. Fm7 seems more sensitive to potential breakage than fm6. I know…i just had to get a new controller.

Forza wears out thumbsticks very quickly. I’m on my 4th or 5th Xbox one controller. You can get them new on Amazon for $45

9

Like I said, the wheel onscreen doesn’t behave the same way it does if you really yank the stick to the left, so I’m not totally convinced it’s hardware related. I was trying to think of a way to rule that out, and the best I came up with was to just leave the game alone on a menu where left & right would move the cursor around. I ended up on the “pick a series” screen from the career mode and left it for about 10 minutes. No sign of any movement to the left. Then I went into the Game Controller calibration screen in windows and set it to display raw data, then left the controller there. I also tried to use the controller the way I would while playing, pulling the triggers (couldn’t hit the shift buttons as they’d advance me to the next screen) while keeping my thumb on the left stick. The X & Y Axis values are holding pretty steady, and hold completely steady if I don’t have my thumb on the stick at all. I tried in the subsequent test screen hitting the buttons as well and didn’t see anything out of the cursor showing where the left stick was doing anything out of the ordinary.

I have another XBox One controller (though it’s much older, it’s the one I use with my actual XBox). I’ll try linking it to my PC instead and see if I get the same issue, but I can’t find any signs that this is actually in any way related to hardware.

10

There was a similar issue in Forza 6 which I think never got fixed. Oddly enough now I am using an Elite Controller and have never experienced it in Forza 7, so it might indeed be a controller issue. Loss of wireless signal for a split second.

11

Well, in an effort to try to nail down if it is a controller issue, I’ve now tried two different controllers with two different receivers in multiple USB ports. They all show the same thing when watching the raw values coming off the controller (completely steady with no bursts of lower X-axis values), and every combination had the same problem in the game. I have not seen this issue come up in any other game, including Forza 6: Apex. This appears to only happen in Forza 7 and only when driving, it never occurs in any of the menus.

Next steps: I’ll reinstall Apex and FH3 and see if I can recreate the issue in either of those two games. I’m also going to try both controllers with my XBox and see if they have the same behavior there. I’ve played a few other games in the interim with the same controller and had no issues.

FWIW, I believe that I ran the Endurance race at Spa before the patch came out and, as mentioned, did not have this issue.

EDIT 1: Played a few rounds in Forza 6: Apex. Had no issues. Space is limited on the SSD, so uninstalled that and installing FH3.

EDIT 2: Did a run from Surfer’s Paradise out west past the northern side of the airport, then looped back on the highway to the south and back to SP. Lots of long straightaways at high speed, no issues with steering.

EDIT 3: Attempted to run some laps on Forza 7 with everything else on my PC disconnected (Saitek X52 flight stick, Fanatec Clubsport pedals) and I am no longer having the problem. I had steering assigned to the disconnected wheel. My theory, especially since F7 seems to enjoy reassigning my pedal inputs to a non-existent pedal set occasionally, is that F7 helpfully reassigned my steering inputs to one of the pedal axes. Since the pedal naturally is at the low end of its throw when I’m not pressing it, every once in a while it’d notice a little jitter out of the pedal and think it’d activated, then assign that value to the steering, then almost immediately notice that the controller had sent a new signal and switch back. Similar to what some other people have mentioned, how the menus will flutter between showing keystrokes and buttons to navigate, I think it’s really quick to think it’s found a new device and switch to it, then switch almost immediately back.

While I’m not thrilled about the idea of digging around to disconnect my pedals and flightstick every time I want to play with a controller, I’m happy that I think I’ve solved the issue, at least for myself. I’m not sure it helps OP, as I’m not sure having multiple devices connected to an XBox One is nearly as common as it is for a PC.