When making adjustments what are some good numbers to use in regards to tuning a component. I know each person has there own preference and it is all based on the feedback the car is giving you, but I was just looking for an overall suggestion on what is considered a minor or major adjustment. For example a spring adjustment. If a spring is 500lbs what would be a minor adjustment in either direction? +50 lbs… would that be considered a small adjustment? Would I be able to get a good change with adding just 50lbs to a spring? My fear is that I may not be adjusting a component enough or too much to get the change I am looking for when I am tuning a car. Any Help or advice anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.
I guess it depends on your feel for the difference.
I can feel one tap from springs if the springs are one sided and I tap the softer side.
I would say 1 to 5 taps is fine tuning. If you can feel if you should know if its enough or too little or too much.
I second that, it largely depends on the tuner’s/driver’s ability to properly judge the car’s feel and speed around the track. Now to add my 2¢, my build and tuning adjustment philosophy might be a bit unconventional and slightly inconvenient because of my understanding of the units varies from Metric to Imperial when looking at the build process and tuning adjustment options given to us in Forza so I use mostly Metric for speed, weight, stiffness, and weight balance calculations while I use Imperial for adjusting power levels and tires pressures. The results of my tuning and building style fits perfectly with my driving style which was largely influenced by the Gran Turismo series growing up and real-life tuning legend’s like Top Secret, Matchless Crowd Racing, and Mine’s to name a few.
Now more specifically on my adjustment increments, I managed to work out something like a formula for adjusting damping and ARB stiffness using the adjustment range found in the Gran Turismo series for use in FM and FH (FH has a slightly different adjustment range in the ARB and damper sections). I’ll share my formula for calculating the 7 ARB stiffness levels and the 10 damping levels; for the most recent FM games, ARB max is 40.00 right? so take that and divide my 7 which should give you 5.71 and since there isn’t the ability to adjust by the .01 we have to settle for 5.70 which is achieved by first maxing or minimizing out the adjust in multiples of 5.7 up to 39.9. As for FH, the max ARB stiffness is 65.00 so again we divide by 7 and end up with 9.2857 which if we round up we get 9.3 and we can accurately go as stiff as level 6 which is 55.8 in FH while 65.0 is as close to level 7 we can get in FH.
Still with me? ok, so for the figuring out of the calculation of damper stiffness in FM we have 13.0 as our max which means our minimum is 1.3 and our halfway point is 6.5 but for FH we have 20.0 for “Race” coilovers but only 10.0 for “Rally” coilovers which in the case of the “Rally” coilovers it’s pretty self-explanatory when calculating the Gran Turismo-to-Forza adjustment and for the most part it’s more of the same for “Race” with the exception for the it’s minimum Gran Turismo-to-Forza adjustment as for some reason I can seem to remember never going below 4.0.
Sorry for the wall of text but I needed to be sure there was little room for misinterpretation., feel free to send me questions but don’t expect a rapid response because I’m about to head back offline for a bit.
I’m only an amateur but still.
The key to tuning is to identify the problems correctly.
For example: car oversteers on corner exit. You need to check why it’s oversteering and what to do to minimize it. In a front-engined, RWD car the usual course of action is to soften the rear springs. A couple clicks will help.
However, there is such a thing as too much. Soften the rear springs too much and the car not only begins to understeer but there’s also a risk of bottoming out.
You should use your calculator of choice to get a good base then fine-tune to meet your standards. The default setups are terrible so you’ll only gonna waste time trying to tune from scratch by making the small adjustments everyone speaks of.
Even more important than the tune is the build. If the build is bad, no amount of tuning can eliminate some of the build’s inherent problems.