The PI system of cars is very, VERY bad. There’s a few meta cars in every class and if you wanna compete for podium, you must pick from the pools of meta cars.
Looking at you Porsche 550 Spyder, MX-5, Exocet, Elemental etc etc.
These cars are beyond broken for their classes and MUST be rebalanced for the sake of having other cars then these in the game at all!
5 Likes
I don’t race public hoppers and not used these Meta Cars but the PI system is a challenge to get balanced cars. Looking at comments here and on socials I can see why I have not returned to the public racing. I am not in it for the outright win (won’t happen even in identical cars). I am not fast, I use a wheel and never been a fan of running the Leaderboard cars ever. Race to enjoy and better myself.
This will always be an issue in the standard class racing where any car is available with any upgrade to meet the PI. Only rule is that it fits in that class. And there will always be those that have to win at any cost… Until a fix look at spec racing or join a group to race with. It’s not all about the win.
I normally race with a group and we have a crew that spend countless hours making a selection of cars have some sort of parity with the PI system to match. It is not easy with the road cars as upgrades from different makes and models are all over the place. Over upgrade then use a power handicap to make them drivable. It is the only work around we have found but does not work for any public racing.
The biggest unbalance we see via our group is the actual race cars PI. Some cars should be close to identical but that minor variance in the PI and some odd numbers in their specs is a huge factor (look at the Golf GTi TCR when released as DLC, before its nerf). The answer to this would be increase the amount of restrictor plates with finer variances for race cars rather than changing their specs or particular upgrades that give them that advantage. Instead of a huge boost in power or that minor drop to keep it within the Forza classes allow the ability to adjust that power in smaller increments to even them up (both more and less power). The ballast would also work but we have been using that for a success ballast during a race series or evening the classes to keep the racing closer (+3 Pro, +2 Pro-Am, +1 Am).
1 Like
The PI system is not very, very bad. It’s imperfect, which isn’t the same. How many hundreds of cars do we have? How many possible upgrade variations are there for every one of those? Add tuning on top of that. Can you imagine trying to come up with a system that flawlessly accounts for 347,092,536,707,334,628,035 combinations of car+parts+tuning? It’s a miracle we even get cars in the ballpark. Perfection is a good goal, but not a realistic expectation.
3 Likes
There are things that turn 10 could do to improve balance of cars:
-hard rpm limit on redline, so that players can’t redline abuse meta engines (p550 is all about redline abuse)
-ignore clutch, and transmission shift time in pi calculation (free clutch and transmission upgrade, pi affected only by weight, not shift time, since meta is all about m/c race transmission that skips all shift time modifiers) [currently meta cars gain advantage from using stock clutch]
-for OPEN races cars should have locked 100% fuel, and disabled tyre wear, (some cars can fit even 400l of fuel, that’s 400kg lighter car on min fuel, that is not calculated by pi. About tyre wear… Lighter cars with more grip have too big advantage)
-slightly increase Forza aero pi cost. (Like 1pi/part)
Bonus: rims size/style should not affect car weight/handling, big heavy rims are just worst part of tunning meta, it looks rly bad.
“Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.”
2 Likes
Egzactlty! Ensure the worst outcome by avoiding success at all costs.
The acceleration value is extremely overvalued. Same goes for top speed. This PI calculation does not fit a normal racing scenario but it feels like it was made for FH with short sprint races.
Most of the cars in this game are unfit to race, so you never see cars like Bentleys in the Open series, but I guess that’s what the devs want, huh?
They have to redo the PI evaluation from scratch and wipe all boards and tunes and start it all from day 0.
2 Likes
The flaws of the PI system have been with us for over 15 years, I don’t see it getting “perfectly balanced” any time soon.
2 Likes
Yeah you’re right! Coming up with a balanced and fair system would be too hard. Let’s not even try 
2 Likes
As a long-time Forza player I’m well accustomed with the flaws of the PI system and know what to expect. It has always been the same traits of cars which are strong and thus it has been mostly the same cars that have been meta.
That being said I think some cars need manual adjustment by T10.
The Porsche 550 and especially its suspension glitch issue needs urgent fixing. The car is dominant from D to A if the driver knows what he’s doing (it currently has the WR on A-Class Nordschleife by a whopping 4 seconds).
My B600 no aero sport tires Shelby GT500 with ~450 bhp got smoked on the straights of Road America by a aero race tires 550. It’s just wrong.
Fixing the suspension glitch and hard-limiting its redline would bring it more into balance.
The Mercedes W154 has serious issues with stock and street brakes installed. The car behaves like it has permanent wheel lock-up. Under acceleration, turning and braking. Installing race brakes fixes it generally but it can randomly reoccur when launching practice/qualifying or races.
All electric cars. I’m not a fan of EVs but if T10 chose to have them they should at least be useful. Most of them are so slow that cars a whole class beneath are faster.
Their issues:
- locked gearbox. For example the Xpeng is locked to ~190 km/h despite having over 400 bhp.
- forced AWD. AWD is crap in Motorsport and every forced AWD car has a significant disadvantage in performance and tire wear.
- PI calculation is done for 100% “fuel”. While combustion engine cars can lower their weight (basically increasing PI) at no cost EVs don’t have that option. That’s a several seconds disadvantage.
4 Likes
There’ll always be “meta” cars it’s inevitable. That said if 1 or 2 cars dominate the leaderboards and races then I’d like T10 to look at them and see why. If it’s due to an unintended feature then it would be good to have them rebalanced.
I feel other cars are more competitive than many people realise, however It’s fairly time consuming to build, tune, test a car and then extract the most out of it on track before deciding if it’s worth it or not.
People are used to the quick fix of looking on leaderboards seeing the top car and clicking “get tune” (if it works!!) which exasperates the problem.
2 Likes
It’s not the PI system.
It’s OPEN CLASS
We need to have regulation classes, where weight limits, tyre type, and drive type all come into play.
Removing anything from open class means it’s no longer open.
Currently we have very limited spec racing, it needs updating.
Eg one week we have. C Class RWD 1200kg & above, along side C Class FWD upto 1199kg
And switch the classes each week.
2 Likes
The promise of the PI system is that 2 cars with the same rating, no matter the car and no matter the build, achieve identical times on-track.
All Forza titles have failed to meet this promise, considering cars with the same rating can be several seconds per lap apart from one another.
Therefore a competitive player will try to seek and exploit the flaws in the system to find the fastest combinations.
The way these games calculate the rating has flaws and gaps in logic that open up these exploitable variances. Solving it would require a complete redesign, and I doubt Turn 10 or Playground would do that since the system is “good enough” for the vast majority of players.
2 Likes
“A complete redesign?”
Like “from the ground up?” 
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Unbalanced is the right word even though I’m sure Turn 10 has thought about every conceavable way to make it the fairest possible so I agree with PJ, if it has’nt happened in 15 years, it is what it is.
Having said that, it is entirely possible to make “similar cars” very close in performance by mimicking real competitions. To do so, you need to forget about set PI values (at first) and start with power to weight ratio, use almost identical parts then do lots of testing.
I tried so with a 1997 Mazda RX7 and a 1998 Porsche 968 Turbo S.
The RX7 has 195kW (262hp), 294nm (217 ft/lb) and weighs 1169kg (2577 pounds). That’s 0.167 kw per kg.
The 968 has 227kW (304hp), 501nm (369ft/lb) and weighs 1350kg (2976 pounds). That’s 0.168 kw per kg.
Modifications were the classic road-to-track things:
- Race suspensions
- Adjustable anti-roll bars
- Full roll cage
- Race gearbox
- Race differential
Stock brakes, tyres, tyre width, no adjustable aero. One has 200kg more, the other has 200nm of torque less.
Ran both within a tenth of a second at Sunset Peninsula after about 10 laps for each.
Now if you want to compete with a MINI against a McLaren, obviously that’s a different story 
This company publicly said Forza Motorsport (2023) was “built from the ground up” as “the most technically advanced racing game ever made” to be a “racing platform for the future” with “a more agile pipeline to very easily & very quickly change the game & add features much more readily” and “no plans after launch except to listen to the community and make quicker adjustments…”
…But so many of the same old shortcomings from prior installments remain, and so much of the community’s feedback is often stone-walled with “that would be too difficult to improve.”
Will this “racing platform for the future” be forever stuck with the flaws of its past?
7 Likes
Brutal when you put it that way, but, undeniable.
Maybe it was the original pitch to Phil Spencer or the head of MGS.
1 Like
i did play around when tunning 300 slr, and i was able to improve lap time on grand oak national by 2s. by using weird values in suspension, tho i accidentaly discovered how to bug out suspension on some old cars 
SLR is probably the only car that needs -5 camber on front tho, since this car will slide everywhere on 5% fuel otherwise
and for suspension bug u need min rear spring stiffeness, gained ~10km/h on lemans straight
Tho in case of this car, its undrivable with bugged suspension, so for races i used max rear springs and min ride height.
1 Like
whole suspension geometry extreme settings seems to bug out old cars suspension
That’s not the goal of the PI system, if that would be the case car building would be trivial., since the number would already tell you how fast the car is, right? Let alone one single number cannot account for different track characteristics.
Instead T10 opted for a system where car building much like tuning requires knowledge and experience.
In this sense each car has a PI budget you can spend on upgrades. The game won’t tell you how to spend the budget most efficiently for any given track. That’s part of the game to find out.
I’m convinced T10 knows exactly how each build performs on any given track. They use this system for instance to balance AI cars against your build.
Any imbalances in the PI system (e.g. meta cars) are due to design, not because the system isn’t working.