hi, I like to mix it up online to make my skills better (when it’s working and not crashing) also I like to take cars that are different and not like the follow the sheep crowd cars, I love B700,A800 and S1, ive a B700 Hilman imp that is a grip monster and also A800 ford roadster hula girl that I’ve tuned myself and most cars I end up winning with, I’ve shared the tunes so give them a try and see, they may not be your first choice of fast super cars but with a balanced tune and good driving i get the win which angers most players a little.
So whats everyone’s choice of cars that shock others online when they wouldn’t of normally thought of that car being good with a smart tune.
Thanks. Just had a quick go in the Dirt version. It doesn’t strike me as capable of having much success in Ranked in the current build. I had two runs at Lakehurst Forest Trail, which is primarily dirt. It’s very hard to control on there - does it have dirt tyres? I had two attempts with a best of 2.20. I then had two attempts in the 65 Mini and ran 2.08, so 12 seconds quicker. That’s a large amount to be giving away in time and the Mini itself isn’t quite top tier on that sort of course (it doesn’t have the top end speed for the reasonably long straight).
The Hula Girl by the way is one of the top 5 cars in A class in my view but it’s well known. Definitely not a sleeper car.
I tend to use the top cars in Ranked. At this point, it’s hard to find real hidden gems. As mentioned above, the Mini is excellent in both B and A class for technical dirt courses (like Glen Rannoch for example). The 32 Ford Coupe is very good in A class and the Datsun 510 is decent in both A and B if you want to use something different. It will still be a struggle though to match a competent driver in one of the class leading cars.
Yea I’ve given up trying to make that tune better, it does lack power and most are using the Daytona and alfa so will look at them cars next, did you try the hula girl tune and ive now started on a Porsche 911 Carrera 2 by Gunther Werks setup for S1-900 with grip and speed but I’m not sure if it matters when others use assistance like ABS and TC, i don’t use them and I use manual setup too.
A good starting point for seeing if a tune you’ve made is good is to try to put it high up on a rivals leaderboard. There are probably dirt circuits with Daytona and Alfa tunes high up, so you can see if you can get your tunes up there. One annoying aspect of the game is that you can’t download shared tunes from the rivals leaderboards like you can in FM7.
well I’ve been working on a few now and seem to be getting the grip on what cars to pick, ive a pretty solid few now if anyone wants to try them, just add my gamertag off here.
I just had a go with your GT-R 97 tune. Had two runs using it at Derwent Reservoir Sprint rivals (A class obviously). You’ll find my time in 138th position (top 5% so not bad). Running Manual Clutch with ABS the only assist on.
I enjoyed using the tune. Thought the handling was really crisp and it handled the fast corners particularly well. It probably lacks a bit of top end speed for that particular track but certainly seemed solid and easy to drive. It was a little sluggish off the line though, which wouldn’t be ideal for ranked, which I think was also the case with your Imp tune. I don’t know enough about tuning to know how to fix that but someone else on here might be able to give some tips.
As Bree mentioned, running Rivals is one of the best ways to check out your tunes. You might also want to see how you get on against my ghost in the same car. It’s not a perfect run by any means but it doesn’t contain any significant errors and I tend to be reasonably successful at ranked.
Thanks for giving it a go, I can lower the gears for launch but I didn’t want to compromise the top speed that much as its not a world setter but could lower it a little, I have messaged you back with a few others to try out but not sure they will be good.
Did the PI used by a race gearbox limit you to only being able to change final drive? It’s a pain when that’s the case, it does make the launch a bit sluggish because when you can only change the final drive, you have to prevent it from hitting the rev limiter in top gear, as you say, so first gear is largely not able to be adjusted. Often, you just have to accept that car isn’t as good as other options that can have the race gearbox almost for free.
If I find the time today I’ll also look into some of your tunes, Willy Wonker 1.
Knowing when it’s justified to pay the PI for gearbox upgrades needs a lot of tuning and driving experience. Once the drivetrain is swapped though, I would always pay the practically non-existent cost of the race gearbox.
The sluggish start is only a problem for AWD though. There are two ways to counter it by some margin:
Diff setting
If run with MC increasing the rpm by clutching to bring it into the rpm range where the engine has enough power to pull the car efficiently (mostly a minor gain but a gain is a gain ;)).
In general, I think there aren’t any hidden “weapons” for Ranked left anymore. The strongest are known and most of them follow the same pattern anyways (related to how the car is structured).
Track-Tor and the Bone Shaker were the two most obvious examples but the Roadster, Bubbletop, Nova FE, EB110 SS and Daytona are strong due to mostly the same reasons. The potential of newly added cars is quickly judged too. The “meta game” is set and since we won’t see any balance changes the set of cars one has to prepare for Ranked is pretty clear.
Rivals. It’s a bit spread out in the user interface, but one way that works for all of them is to go to the start location of the race, and from there you can always access rivals. If it has a seasonal event on, you need to switch to normal event to access rivals.
I guess the question here is what are you aiming for:
to maximise your prospects of winning at ranked;
to find some different cars which can enable you to be competitive at ranked even if your prospects aren’t as strong as if you were using the absolute top cars; or
to improve your tuning generally.
If the former, I’d agree with Rayne. You probably aren’t going to find a car which no one has thought of and you are best to stick to the known best cars.
If the middle option, between us I’m sure we can come up with a list of second tier cars which are competitive even if not the meta cars in class and/or recommend tunes for some cars.
If the latter, Rayne and Bree both know what they are talking about and I’m sure they can provide some tips.
I just tried your Gunther Werks tune. Thought it was good fun to drive, handled well and seemed to have good top end speed. I set a time at North Coast Rush (Street event) and managed 59th place which seems pretty decent. However, looking at other times, it’s a long way off what I suspect I’d do in one of the top S1 class cars. I suspect you could definitely win races at ranked as it’s a solid build and not much can go wrong but you’d be giving away quite an advantage to someone in, say, a Bugatti EB110.
I also did a bit of testing of different tunes for the 97 Skyline at the Derwent Reservoir Sprint course using a few tuners I have in my favourites list:
Johnson’s tune was therefore quickest for what is a relative speed course but was also hardest to drive. The other two tunes were both fairly solid and felt like they’d work well across a range of courses. Might be worth seeing if you like using any of them or whether their builds give you any ideas for your own build of that car.
I didn’t save any of those times, so my time for that course is still the one I set using your tune if you do want to do a direct run against my ghost.
I tested your A800 R33 against the build I would probably run (my R33 normally is tuned to B700). Both were run on my own test track under the same conditions:
My R33: 6:31.704
Your R33: 6:37.467
Your build has more mechanical grip due to the usage of Sports tires. Thus, the braking and grip at lower speeds is better than on my build.
My build has higher grip once the aero comes into play. There is a turn on my track where I can reliably judge mid-speed grip. My build did the turn with 204 km/h, yours with 196.
The good things of your build:
correct engine swap, no upgraded front tire width, precise & stable suspension setup, no PI wasted on race gearbox, clutch upgrades or front-aero.
Things I would change/improvements:
for AWD I would always install rear-aero and set it to the minimum value. Decreases PI in most cases and provides more cornering grip. An easy way to counter the light understeer with minimum value is to set the anti-roll bars to 1/65.
for AWD in most cases weight reduction leads to better results than upgrading the tire level. As pointed out above my build achieves higher mid-high speed grip although it only runs Street tires. The rear-aero in combination with the race weight reduction provide enough grip to do the job equally well/better than installing Sports tires. And you gain a stronger power/weight ratio this way.
you upgraded the camshaft of the V8. In most cases upgrading the camshaft is not a good decision because its PI cost/bhp & torgue ratio is the weakest of all engine upgrades. Especially on this engine because you limit your option to redline it. This engine lives on redlining because it doesn’t lose much power beyond the stock redline. Optimum shift point for this engine is around 6.500 rpm (6.800 if run with centrifugal supercharger). With the camshaft upgrade you deny yourself this major advantage.
There are times where a camshaft upgrade can be useful:
one of the rallye engines for example where the camshaft upgrade completely alters the power graph.
if you can save massive amounts of PI by keeping lower gearbox upgrades and have to increase the top speed.
But these cases are rare and require a lot of tuning experience.
As a result your build produces ~50 bhp more than mine but less torgue. With this your build runs 340 km/h down the highway while mine does 325 with rear-aero. This difference on A800 is negligible because you’ll never need those speeds anyway.
I have uploaded my suggested build (“Forums Test”) so you could buy a new R33, install my tune, remove it and see what parts I used. Then alter the suspension, brakes, tire pressures to your liking. A real shame that there isn’t an option to share open tunes. I wouldn’t mind people altering my settings because they are tailored to my driving style and won’t fit everyone. Or to change the rims choice or optic parts.
I doubt anyone is surprised or angry when you win in a Roadster, one of the best cars in the game.
And with tunes for general racing rather than for one specific track, it is unlikely you (or I) will be able to reinvent the wheel better than one of the existing tunes available for download.
I can imagine people getting angry about someone using the Roadster like they used to get angry about people using the Bone Shaker. It’s a bit odd, though, because in GT Sport it’s mostly taken for granted that people will use the meta, and you get races where the entire field has all chosen the same car (but it’s a bit different to FH4 in that the time differences are very small, and people regard a car as having been ruined if the BOP changes to make it 0.03 per lap slower, so the meta tends to be different for different tracks). It seems a bit odd to me to choose a weaker car then get annoyed because everyone else doesn’t agree that we should all use the 3rd best car rather than the 1st best car.
Re tunes, I’m almost always able to go faster with my own tune than the best tune I can find from someone else. The only exception I can think of from recent times is that Huracan “Sprints” tune we used, where I couldn’t tune it myself to even equal the performance of that tune.
To the OP: you should join us in the rivals thread and see if you can produce tunes that are faster.