I’ve noticed there’s been a few posts asking about gear tuning (both in here and on FM5) that rarely get answered. It seems most people opt for the sports transmission then just adjust final drive but I prefer to take full control and install the race transmission especially when the PI cost is low (seems to differ a lot in different cases depending on what car and what engine upgrades are installed as to the cost in PI).
Since I had to write something up explaining how I tune gears for a friend I though I may aswell write up a post and share it with everyone else aswell.
Ive tried to write this so that ANYONE can follow along and understand, so sorry for the over-detailed explanations.
I’m interested to know what people think about it, if any of the pro’s disagree with my method or if anyone can give any merit to the science behind it, but so far it’s worked pretty well for me.
I used to use the Forza Calculator to get my gears and noticed that it takes on board the drive tire size and the displacement, Im not sure how this affects the gearing, whether it affects the individual gears or if this information is more used towards the final drive, if anyone has any information on that then that’d be awesome.
Let get to it…
First off, BEFORE I adjust any individual gears I usually set my final drive so that the last gear reaches the end of the graph, this gives me nice wide ratio gears to begin with, im not too exact here as I will come back and change this later. You can also use the 0-100 and top speed indicators if you prefer but as I said, this is just a starting point and will get an idea of how the car will drive. Head to the highway and take her for a spin and pay attention to the sound of the car when shifting, you’ll find some shifts just sound like they drop in RPM too much and some will shift too high in to the next gear, others will just sound perfect. Think about when youve watched races on TV and the sound of smooth gear progression you hear there.
First Gear.
I find this the hardest to get right especially with very powerful RWD cars. I try to lengthen this gear to the point that I dont get too much engine revving when accelerating from a stand still (not revving first). This usually sits between the 2nd and 3rd vertical line in the graph. If I get a lot of revving then I will lengthen it further, if I get none then I will see how it goes shorter. You’ll get used to what works as you go along a few times but in general, using the graph as a guide and setting it between that 2nd and 3rd line will work well enough most of the time.
Second Gear
the most important one I find as it makes setting the rest much easier.
First, I find out my Peak Torque RPM to use as a guide as to where to set it. If you already know how to find your PEAK TORQUE RPM then skip ahead to the next highlighed section…
To find this, make sure you are in manual and head to the highway (or runway works well too). From a standstill or rolling, bring up your telemetry (hold down on the DPAD) and switch to your final gear. Begin accelerating and keep an eye on the TORQUE, it will rise up until a certain point then begin to drop again. This number varies a lot depending on your cars setup. Example, it will rise to say 397 then beging to decrease again. Now, you need to redo this and this time you want to KEEP NOTE OF WHAT THE RPM IS WHEN THE TORQUE REACHES IT HIGHEST POINT.
Eg: The Torque reaches 397 then begins to decrease again, Whatever the RPM is at the time the TORQUE reaches that 397 (its peak), that is the peak torque RPM, this is the number you want.
This can be difficult to see as some cars will climb faster others will do so slowly or will stay at the max torque for longer. Do this a few times over (you dont need to come to a complete stop each time just ease the brakes or release throttle until your RPM is lower and begin acccelerating again). If your having trouble you can say XBOX record that and watch the replay (I believe it has slowmo?), In any case, round this to the nearest 100, and if your stuck between 2 figures Ill generally round up. What this has done is given you a starting RPM for your second gear, use the graph and set your second gear so that the bottom of the line rests at the RPM figure you just got. What this means is that when you shift from first to second, providing you shift just at the redline, the RPM at second gear will begin at that number. If it set too long the car will bog down and youll be able to hear it struggling to climb the gear. If you set it too short the car will rush through the gears too quick and you will lose a lot of top end speed, also in lower gears you may still be spinning the tires in 2nd and even 3rd gear if its set too short.
SETTING YOUR SECOND GEAR
Anyway, now you have a starting point for your second gear. If you tend to short shift then however much RPM you short shift by, ADD that from the peak torque RPM when setting your second gear, if you shift a little later then SUBTRACT that amount. If you drive Auto then keep in mind that it will always short shift by a few hundred RPM so this will needed to be ADDED from your PEAK TORQUE RPM. Confused? Ill try explain this better.
If your redline begins at 7000RPM and you shift from 1st to 2nd just as your RPM hits 7000, then the RPM of your 2nd gear will begin exactly where the bottom of the line in the graph is set. If you shift gears a little earlier, say at 6800 RPM, then the RPM when hitting 2nd gear will be lower by the same amount, in this case by 200RPM. When driving an AUTO, the gearbox will always short shift, usually by a couple of hundred RPM, so when setting your second gear you will need to make sure that you factor that in, this can be done easily by driving in a straight line and taking note of your RPM when your car shifts gears (either in telemetry or by looking at the needle in your tacho). However much the difference is (say 300 RPM) is how much you will want to ADD to the PEAK TORQUE RPM that you want to set your second gear to, otherwise when you shift into second you will be UNDER the ideal RPM and your car will bog down. Obviously if you tend to shift later (after redline) then you will want to SUBTRACT the amount you overshift by when setting second your gear.
Right, hope that all made sense.
Third gear and beyond.
Now that thats all done the rest is fairly simple. The following gears should never drop below that RPM figure that you set your second gear, in fact no gears should ever start at less RPM than the gear before it. If second gear is set to begin at 4500RPM then 3rd gear should begin at something higher.
What you want to achieve here is a nice gradual curve in your gears starting points (the bottoms of the lines in the graph), this curve should be steep to begin with and then begin to level out in later gears. I will usually just do this by eye from looking at the graph to get a startig point, remembering that each gear should start at a higher RPM each time, as you get further into gears (say 5th and 6th) the starting RPM will start to level out.
Im not sure how else to explain this so I’ve drawn up a really dodgy picture to help, it may also help clarify anything in the previous paragraph.
So in this graph you have the RPM on the left, the black lines represent gears, the bottom of these lines indicate what the starting RPM is for that gear and the top of these lines indicated the redline RPM, along the bottom you will have the speed, basically how fast you will be travelling at each stage of the gear progression.
The RED line that I added would have been the MAX TORQUE RPM, you can see how the second gear was set to be right at that line.
The BLUE line shows the curve that your aiming for with the remaining gears, you can see how it straightens out as the gears progress.
OK, hopefully that made a but more sense, now comes the testing.
Take your car out to the highway or the airfield and take it for a spin. What you want to do here is listen out for that shift between 1st to 2nd, It shouldnt bog down too much but it shouldnt start too high, if youve done everything correctly and shifted at the correct time then this should be fine as it is, if not feel free to make some adjustments, I will typically favour a shorter gear in 2nd and place it 100-200RPM above the peak torque RPM). Now you want to move to your 3rd gear, listen out and try to get a similar sound or feel to it, it wont necessarily be the same pitch but you will be able to tell if its starting in too low an RPM as it will literally sound like the car loses power. The same goes for if its set too high, you will hear it start much higher than the previous gear, Your aiming for a nice smooth transition both in sound and in feel. Always worrk on one gear at a time and work your way UP, if you work backwards and make any changes to a lower gear it will change the way the remaining gears shift aswell so work your way UP. Once you have 3rd gear sounding smooth you can move on to 4th gear, and so on and so forth. The final gear (as in LAST GEAR, not to be confused with the FINAL DRIVE) can be a bit tricky, it kind of depends on your car but if you have a car that is reaching its top speed quite quickly then you may want to have a slightly longer final gear so that it doesnt top out too soon and bounce on the limiter, this will give you a slightly higher top speed but it will take longer to reach it. Other cars will almost never have enough room to reach its top end so you may opt to have a shorter final gear that will climb quicker but reach its top speed earlier, the same can be said for 5th gear in many cases. This pretty much comes down to preference, I will usually just lenghten my last gear so that it reaches its maximum without bouncing (as in revving at its limit).
It will take some practice to work out the sounds of the engine and what sounds right and what doesnt, and despite this being a rather long-winded tutorial of sorts, its actually a pretty quick process (I’ll have a reasonably good tune within 5-10 minutes and another 5 minutes of really fine tuning from there).
And thats it, hopefully you’ve now got a car that’s purring like an angry kitten on crystal meth and that stays reasonably well within its powerband.
From here you can make final changes to the FINAL DRIVE gear, This will allow you to SHORTEN or LENGTHEN your gears, depending on if you want more top speed or acceleration but will maintain the ratios of all the individual gears that youve just spent all that time getting right. You can use the 0-100 and top speed indicators to try get the most out of this but i personally think those indicators are broken, Im not sure if they consider wheelspin or what parameters are involved with it but they work ok as a guide.
Anyway, I hope this has helped explain a few things to people and hopefully it helps you get a bit more performance out of your vehicles.
I will say that I appologise greatly if any of this info is counter productive or just wrong, Im only sharing what Ive found to work for me and wanted to share my methods with everyone else, Im not a mechanic or tuner in real life or anything so theres no guarantee that any of this is accurate but… well… its a game, try it, play around with it, and if it doesnt work, try a different method.
Last note, when t comes to sepcific tunes for specific tracks and purpose, you can use the speed notations on the graph to see what speeds you will be doing at different gears, this can be handy for drifters aswell to try and keep a certain averaged speed within the middle of a specific gear.
Hope you enjoyed it, now go get racing!
–Ruddy88
