The extra reaction time is the key to it, when it comes to using the slower cars to learn or hone skills. They’re more forgiving in most respects; a mistake that might put you out of a race in an R3 car, or that might kill you in reality, will likely just leave you with some minor body damage in the F cars—if that, even. Going slightly off-track or into a wall at 120 is different from doing it at just 60 or even 80. I have the hardest time explaining that to my nephews; the fast cars, the LMP cars in particular, may look like they must be easy to drive, and very exciting, what with their 9.9-10.0 handling/braking stats, along with the blistering acceleration and great speed…but without the requisite amount of skill or experience, the familiarity with braking points, turn in points, apexes, and shift timing when you throw in the manual/manual+clutch, they might just be sources of annoyance, a massive grind until you learn how to handle them. It is possible to do, but that’s called ‘doing it the hard way.’ Of course, pretty much every car needs to be treated differently to some extent, anyway, so merely learning how to handle a slower car won’t help immediately. Braking points change from car to car, with braking distance and cornering speeds…turn-in points change, too. Shifting points change drastically, perhaps more so than the others. Especially going from what might be as little as a 3-speed, to what may be as high as a 7 or 8-speed. The key to improving in the faster cars by honing skills in the slower cars, is in learning how to recognize the faster car’s needs based on what you learned in the slower car. It’s in putting what you learn in one place, to work in another. You learn how to drive in one car, apply that knowledge to the next, and then fully learn how to drive that one. Formula 1 has GP2 and Cart to look back to, for learning experience, for instance.
Myself, I have the most fun down in the lower levels. The latest and greatest hypercars usually don’t interest me much, but turning a muscle car into a cornering machine thrills me. It’s strange, maybe, but fighting a Bugatti Veyron around a turn is pure agony for me, but doing basically the same thing in a Chevelle or Cobra is like the best thing ever… I do the majority of my running somewhere around B Class, A Class, though there is a lot of running in S Class and C Class as well. I’m through with the Veyrons, but I’m always ready to play with the McLaren F1s. And of course the wide variety of Japanese AWD machines… Love’em, in any class just about.
I do most of my own tuning, but I’m with you; I’ve not figured everything out, and there are things I don’t touch, but I do tweak other things and can feel it out some. When it comes to working on the transmission, I don’t have an answer for everything…no concrete numbers to suggest, or that even I go with. I set aside all the more technical aspects of it, and just adjust things little by little until I feel like the gears are arranged how the car and the track feel like they want. I tune the final drive such that the last gear is at or just below the rev limiter at the fastest part of the track. Generally, I’m below the rev limiter, even outside the red, playing it perhaps a little too safe for a game. If I were to look more closely at what my tachometer says when I’m drafting someone, I might find I have plenty of room to set the gear up further, after all… First gear, I try to tune so that I only use it at the absolute slowest point on the track—but there may be multiple areas where you’ll dip down that low, go that slow. After that, I try to work it out such that I’m spending the least amount of time shifting gears, but making use of everything I’ve got along the way, by keeping an eye on what speed the car can handle through each turn, how slow I have to dip down to brake into the turn, and how soon I have to shift with current settings as I accelerate out… Typically, I don’t want to be shifting up right before a braking point, because then I have to shift down an extra gear. This might sound like I tune for every track individually, but in all honesty I don’t; I almost always use Mugello for testing and tuning, and have found that usually the transmission settings I use for Mugello translate well to other tracks, including Catalunya and Road Atlanta… This may be simply due to it being a game; the parameters might just come out that way. As for differential settings, I don’t touch them much on Forza 1-4, aside from on AWD machines. On another game I played, I messed with the diff settings far more often. In any case, on AWD machines, if they don’t already have a 55-65% rear bias, I tweak and test, with them usually running a bias in that range at the end of my testing, sometimes going even further to 70% rear bias. Decreasing diff settings on an RWD, in most games, seems to me like it slows the rate at which the power comes on, allowing you more grip to finish your turn and line yourself up, but I could be entirely wrong about that. I usually leave it at 75%, or decrease it from there if I think I need to. I may be going about it in entirely the wrong way.
I also frequently test and tune on the fly. I’ll get in the car, build the car up selecting parts carefully, then I’ll do a quick base tune, setting my suspension up a little stiffer than stock, and finally I’ll take the car to the track—again, my usual testing site is Mugello. Once there, I run a lap and see how the car feels, then start adjusting settings little by little to see what feels better or worse, and put together a tune that way, usually setting aside some laps to set up my camber and gearing. I set my anti-roll bars stiffer than stock, as well; usually, the fronts I have stiffer than the rear, for the ARBs. I probably run less camber than others, but do watch my tire temperatures and try to keep them even across the tire; where I differ from others, is that I usually look at it on the longest straight, rather than in the middle of the most demanding turn…this probably leads to me using a more upright setting, running my tires flatter, seemingly prioritizing straightline performance over cornering performance. I do still try to avoid letting the outside edges of my tires getting hotter than the inside, but at the same time I don’t want the inside edges getting too hot, either. I want the tire green all the way across, with the outside edges on both sides of the car lighter green than the inside edges of the tires. If I were to look closer at it in the middle of the turns, it might not actually be as different from others as I think… Caster, I don’t touch. I can’t wrap my head around it, can’t understand it, so it stays however it is. Aerodynamics, I generally set higher than stock, on those cars that I mount adjustable aero components to. Again, I may be going about it the wrong way, but I usually run more downforce in the rear than in the front. In any case, I tend to prefer a car to oversteer, rather than understeer, and I tend to prefer to alter suspension settings and the center of gravity/balance point, rather than alter camber beyond my usual, or other settings.
Of course, like you said, all of that takes time. Don’t always have that, so the tuning calculators and such do make things quick and painless. I think one tuning calculator or another really helped me when it came to drifting, though. I don’t normally like drifting myself; without a wheel, and with the way I manage the stick controls, drifting is difficult for me. I’m not particularly smooth, I don’t think, and it seems to me that drifting requires better smoothness than I can bring to the table… I’m too twitchy. I can surely acknowledge the car and controller management/control required for drifting, it’s amazing really, both in reality and in-game, and sometimes I can manage it in this game or that, but nothing like a true drifter…