Car Weight, Torque and Handling

I usually race in S and A class and have a variety of cars in both. I’ve noticed that some cars can’t apply as much downforce on the front and rear as others. When tuning for S class, the more weight I remove from the car, the more weight I have to add via downforce depending on the amount of torque the car has. However, if I can’t apply more than 100kg of weight via downforce and make the car too light, it’s shear torque power makes it hard to handle.

If my car is between 1400kg to 1500kg with 600-700 N-m (torque), I’d need a good 150kg to 200kg of downforce to handle it well. My Nissan GTR Black Edition can only apply 100kg of downforce so I tend to leave the car weight at around 1600kg since it has over 800 torque N-m.

What’s the average weight of your cars (including downforce) that you guys race with in S class with relation to its torque?

I could not give you the correlation between torque and downforce for my cars.

But i don’t think that there is a true correlation between the two. I hardly run any downforce, I typically lower it all the way down front and rear.

Downforce can help the car handle slightly better, however, you will get more bag for your buck tuning the springs/arb/shocks.

If you can give more specifics in regards to what you mean by “hard to handle” then you will probably get more responses.

  • does the car oversteer on corner exit
  • unstable on the straights
  • doesn’t want to turn in
  • ???

have you looked through the tuning guide? Its a big help.
http://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst221_Tuning-Guide.aspx

General rule you want to remove as much weight as possible regardless of how much doqnforce u can add. Less weight turns better and accelerates and stops faster.

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Agree with this.

Also I’d like to remind, that downforce is almost completely useless when you are going under 100km/h (60mph) cause you are going so slowly, that the wings will not generate any downforce.
For example, all versions of Bernese Alps, in every corner high downforce will give you better grip, but on tracks like Yas Marina there is only few corners where you would be going fast enough that the downforce would truly help you. (This is only assumption by looking at the track map. as I do not have FM5 yet, and FM4 didn’t feature Yas Marina.)