Online Tuning vs. Offline - what's the Secret to Success?

When I am building tunes for offline racing, it performs as expected.
When I use that same car and tune for online racing, it handles completely different than before.
The end result is usually a huge understeer problem - the car just won’t turn as well.
To clarify, this is for mainly AWD tunes . . .

My usual fix for Understeer:
Soften front ARB
Soften front springs
Add power to the rear
Lower the stiffness / rebound
Play with the diff lock a bit.
If all else fails: adjust the front with a little more down force - if using it.

I feel that I have a pretty good grasp on creating tunes that work for me.

BUT, what else do I need to adjust to make a car/ tune perform well in online racing?
Not tried this yet:- do I get stupid exaggerated on the understeer adjustments that take it well outside the:
MAX - MIM x Weight% + MIM - formula?
If so, by what percent would be a decent starting point?

I greatly appreciate any tips / ideas / formulas that will help get this right.

I’m sure this may be a useful thread for many other players that might enjoy tuning as much as I do, but are so frustrated after investing all that time and effort just watch their car slam the wall online when it worked just fine offline.

Thanks Again!

when racing online most players tend to over drive the vehicle. late braking, late turn in, just late with everything.

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Offline is mainly a scripted experience, online is not. Your going to meet absolute incompetence and godlike players at the same time, hence why your saying your performance is not consistent, unless you mean the actual physics of the game are changing which would be weird.

But know first that your “build” is way more important than your tune.

Just stating general stuff for your AWD’s doesn’t help much.

What AWD cars are you building? (They aren’t all effective btw…)
What class?

Tyres are one of the main things to be wary of. Every car requires a benchmark grip value to be able to run well online at a competent pace. Turn in, braking etc.

I’ve never encountered this “tune works differently offline/online” thing - at least with my own tunes which are all I’m using.
I know there were some issues with downloaded tunes not “installing” correctly and input lag that may felt like a tune issue.

For AWD there is no formula except “always full rear tire width and ARBs”.
The rest is depending on the car (stock AWD, swapped, modern Sports suspension or not and countless other aspects). Some cars will always be trash.

The rest is experience & knowledge. Which tires on which PI, which engines on which PI, aero yes/no, AWD swap at all or no.
No generally valid guideline there.

If you have some questions about a specific car for a class and surface, I’ll gladly help. But otherwise I could write a book about it and then another one about exceptions & exceptions.
It’s too complex with the amount of choices.

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Thank you for the response, but a formula most certainly does exist.
About to thread steal my own thread - but so be it . . .

MAX - MIM x Weight% + MIM = the desired result that is entered on the tuning bar.

EX:- front spring - On the slide bar, if the Max rating on the right is say 1050 and the minimum on the far left is 300 - the following is the calculation.
You also need to check the front weight % on car details - say 45% front weight.

So it would be: 1050 - 300 = 750 x .45 = 37.5 + 300 = 637.5.

So the front spring rate should be set to 637.5 - based upon the data in the formula for the best balance for this car.

The rear spring would use the same formula - but the - Front weight % would be 55% - because the front spring plus the rear spring weight needs to be 100%.
So:
1050 - 300 = 750. x .55 = 412.5 + 300 = 712.5 for the rear spring.

637.5 front
712.5 rear

That is 45% balance to the front springs.
And a 55% balance to the rear springs.
= 100% total spring balance on the car.

And then add little tweaks it as needed to find the perfect adjustment for the specific model vehicle.

This formula can be used on many other tuning tabs to find the best adjustment.
Not going to get into it anymore than that.

I built a 69 Mustang - on my event lab recreation of this weeks Trial -I ran a 2.19.2 on Reservorio Sprint - (SP?)

My Event Lab = 219.2
Trial race = 223.7 - stupid slow AI’s and no competition in the player pool.
The car pushed hard in a turn online that was not a problem offline.

You can check the User created Tune program, and can see that some state “Online racing” - tuned- to specify - this car is different.
I’m trying to find out what makes it different. . . that’s all.

Thanks all that replied.

Can’t disagree . . .

Also, before its mentioned - I also set up the Front ARB to minimum, at times rear ARB to max . . etc . . .
Because - sometimes, formula based tuning doesn’t always work.

IDK, 4 sec on almost 4min track in 1 run with unknown starting positions and conditions doesn’t sound too suspiciously.
Well, at least for me, sometimes I’m not the most consistent driver.
I think we need more data to draw some conclusions. Maybe group testing?

Overall, few times I have felt something similar (more often in FH4), but I don’t think it was ever confirmed.

One other thought, is that an Event Lab that is created to mirror the online races, doesn’t really build the exact same racing conditions. I’m not a programmer, but maybe with the other players racing along with me, it might create a little bit of a lag that is taking place, which changes my turning apex time, and makes me have too much speed, which can create the push, but it isn’t noticeable to the eye.

I doubt I’m the only one, but when racing in a high density area like a city, at times, the lag - is ridiculous.

Maybe it’s an XBOX One S problem.
But I do know without a doubt that I can’t drive as well online.
My internet isn’t slow if that is a thought:- 800 down / 20 up - that should be more than enough.

I guess many other conditions can be at work . . .

Huh, there are countless players who offer these tunes alongside the conditioned meta approach, if you understand the stats the tune selector screen shows. The problem is they get drowned out for online use because most don’t care about visuals when it comes to racing.

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While I won’t offer any specific tuning advice, I think I can give a general one.

First of all, I drove a ton of cars and tunes and I’ve never seen same tune behave differently in online vs offline setting. But I did see myself drive very differently, simply because my own performance is below expected, which adds stress, which makes me push harder than needed and make more mistakes. You might be facing the same situation.

Now, about using offline experience as a test ground. You can and absolutely should do it as otherwise how you test the tunes. But the way to do it is Rivals, not races against drivatars.

Using drivatars (regardless of difficulty) as any benchmark is pointless because they adjust their performance to both your car and your performance. Which means that depending on what you drive and how you drive it, their behavior is not consistent between the sessions.

For instance, drivatars use beginning portion of the race (~30%) to gauge your performance and set their own performance for the rest of the race based on it. As a result, tunes with better launch and acceleration work great vs drivatars even if they are much slower than less “launchy” tune on the overall distance.

We were just playing with a tune together with friend last week and our initial build was, amongst other things, tearing Pro-level drivatars apart before 25% mark of the race. The final build however - I struggled to win against same drivatars on same track at all. But the lap time in the final build was full 2 seconds better than initial.

So, in short, use rivals time improvement as a benchmark for your tune, ignore any drivatar based results. Hope this wall of text is somewhat useful.

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That’s a simple tuning calculation which I use my own for in Excel. It does set a basic suspension but if the suspension geometry of the car is bad (for example Ferrari J50) it’ll still be understeer hell as an AWD swap.

That’s what I meant with “there is no general formula”.
On cars with rear wheel steering you don’t want to upgrade to Race suspension. Also no use for the formula.
Some of the modern Sports suspensions (488 GTB for example) are better than what can be calculated with a Race one.

That’s where experience & knowledge is way more important in building the car than letting a calculator do its job.

Thanks for the info . .