Howdy Forza Friends and Community Members. Some time ago, I started working on a project of gathering and comparing Forza Tracks from all the Forza Motorsport Series of games. It started out as mainly wanting a handy cross reference sheet, to see which games had which tracks, how many games did a specific track or ribbon appear, and so on.
My buddy Manteo Max was a big inspiration and source of data for this project. Many of you know MM is the Pinnacle of Spread Sheets, the Data King, Lord Emperor of the Stickies Pins, (at the top of the forum pages) Guru of quick links to news, threads, and topics in the forums and FAQs. …hmm, wonder if he could fit that on all on a business card? How does he do it? No one knows! Hieronymus once stated MM was more machine than man (in reference to hearing the speedy typing while he was somehow racing and gathering data) Interesting theory, but I digress.
Max was my hero when I started playing FM4, and I was double buying cars in the auction house, and rebought cars I forgot I hated driving. So, I found MM here on the forums and started taking his spread sheets, modifying the data I wanted, leaving places for my performance information etc, etc, etc.
Fast forward to my project, the skeleton framework was extracted from Max’s sheets, he did not delve into all the various ribbons, but there was great data within, and I expanded from there, but running FM2 – FM7 for track specific information. The ultimate version of the project will have comprehensive track information…
Track, Specific Ribbons, Length, # of Turns, # of Chicanes, Elevation Changes, Locations, as well as a picture of each ribbon layout.
It will be an on-going project but wanted to share it in the form I have it in now, and as I work on updates I will post them here.
The (So Far) 2 Page Spread Sheet can be found here, and viewed or saved.
What you can expect thus far, from Page 1, the overview will show a quick view, with no real details other than Track Name/Ribbon, Location, and which game it appeared in, as shown below:
This sheet can be filtered or sorted to suit your needs. Page 2 will get into the details, Length, Country, Region, Track Type, Race Type, and will eventually house turn data, etc as I expand.
This is going to be a work in progress, I already have a tone of HD Captured Track Images, showing the layout, Max hooked me up with a link that has track data and aerial photos of real race track used in the game, I may use some of those for those data base project as it expands. Hope this data is useful to some of you, or answers some questions about what track was in what game.
On both pages I have put my notes that clear up some conflicting information or naming, such as FM4 calling the ‘Amalfi Coast’ ribbon, ‘Rally di Postano’ (which is a track just above it in the hillside, but only appears in FM3) and did track by track race to verify FM2’s ‘Test Track Infield’ tracks are the same as FM3’s ‘Sidewinder Proving Grounds’, and other things.
If anyone has any updated info or finds any errors, let me know, I find that even with in the FM games, the track length is reported slightly differently in the older games vs newer but a tiny amount.
Thanks for any feedback anyone has and hope this is of some use.