Tuning/Build process/method?

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I don’t really understand tuning/building, and would like to understand more about it. I know how to drive the cars, and I suppose I could go through making minor adjustments, testing each change (and hoping each change is as independent of any other possible change, but it seems some changes affect others etc.) but I’d rather spend the time improving my lap times-- you know, driving, itself. Maybe this isn’t what the game is all about (tuning/building) though.

Recently, I got a good lap time in the first Forza Horizon after discovering particular upgrades of race tire compound, 2-way race differential and race rear-anti roll bars. I feel like I just sort of stumbled onto these upgrades, without understanding too much. The race tires gave a huge boost. Before that, I tried other things like turbo something. Basically, I want to get the make-car-go-faster upgrade, which one is that? Horizon has an “automatic upgrade” feature but it didn’t seem to prioritize what I really needed. Turned out, it was race tires, for that event/class. I mean you know, I sat there and read the descriptions for each upgrade. In this particular case, I didn’t need anything to do with shifting gears because I never needed to leave 3rd gear throughout the entire lap. Ok, so I could eliminate a bunch of stuff right there, like improved clutch, flywheel, etc. After some research on here and youtube I think I made the right decisions about differential and rear (only) anti-roll bar. I just don’t always get expected results when trying to apply theory. And even when I do understand the theory, that doesn’t always help me know how to apply it to racing. Part of it may be understanding not only the benefits of any particular upgrade, but really, what the trade-offs are. For example, I can understand downforce and the tradeoffs of putting a spoiler wing on; it helps with grip and steering around turns, but slows top speed on the straights. Anything else, seems to require trial and error. Is that what it comes down to for tuning/build, a trial-and-error process?

Also, I can’t see Global Rankings in the Leaderboard, only “Near Me”. I don’t have a Gold Live account at the moment, but is anyone able to see Global rankings for that old a game? I realize support would have ended, but I figure all the best times are probably set since it’s old so the older games provide a lot of challenge. I use a different car than all the other times “near me” and I wonder if anyone has a faster time in the car I use. Is there any way to check this?

my posts in the Horizon forum:
https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postsm1196719_I-challenge-anyone-to-get-1st-in-Mini-Mayhem---insane-no-assists.aspx#post_1196719

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Buying upgrades themselves make up a very small part of tuning.

The first and main thing for every vehicle is just to install everything that lets adjust that cars handling settings. Both front and rear antiroll bare, race or rally suspension, race brakes for brake tuning(optional), dif, aero wings IF you want downforce, and the 6 speed if you think the stock transmission doesn’t match the stock engine well. Change the wheel spacing as needed, and install wider tires- do not install larger rims. This is what makes the most difference, and is what you’ll always require.

All the upgrades listed so far do very little to increase the class rating, but massively improves lap times when dialed in. It comes down to trying to do something in the car, finding out it can’t do it, and trying to adjust the settings accordingly to compensate for whatever issue you’re having. Most cars stock, are not tuned for racing, but comfort and daily drivability- fixing those settings for road grip over comfort, will massively improve how fast you can go around corners.

Tire compound/tread is the last thing you add in for handling if everything previous isn’t enough. They massively bump your rating, and shouldn’t be used to compensate for other issues the car is having. IF you have the allowance for it, it can be a better option then adding power on more curvy or short tracks, or cars that just have overpowered engines to start with.

Power/speed:
Adding power does next to nothing to help most cars lap times, and massively bumps up your class rating. Why? If your handling is good enough, you loose less speed (or no speed) in the corners/curves, and so you need less power to compensate for having to get back up to said speed. Adding more power is also useless if the car doesn’t have enough handling/traction to make use of it- the game recognizes this to an extant, and will stop adding rating if the power output is substantially higher then handling is.
If you need more acceleration or top end. Your first priority should be installing all the weight reduction mods first- drive shaft, flywheel, bumper removal, rims, ETC to lower the amount of power needed. It makes a very small impact in rating, but the difference is substantial and helps handling a lot since the suspension isn’t fighting the weight of the car as much.
On stock engines, set your shifting to DCT/paddle shifting if it isn’t already, to bring the engine up into redline for every gear. If you have damage realism turned up it’ll hurt the engine mid race, but otherwise it’s free gains to extend your band. Full manual adds even more control, but also makes shifting a little slower.

Watch your downforce use. It’s pretty much useless on weaker cars, since the downforce adds more weight for the engine to fight. So it’s handling that actively saps power, and is really only useful above 100mph anyways, which limits its use to higher classes.

This is how me and my friend get D class cars whipping around corners at 100mph. Does it take ages for them to hit 100mph? Yes, but they also rarely drop any lower then what the engine can produce at the top speed for a given incline. In the Princes Street Gardens Circuit we get lap times of 1:04 in D class cars, which I think does a good job of showing how much handling matters over power. Granted this is all for track/road grip racing, and not rally/downhill racing that relies heavily on things like slip angle to compensate for what the suspension can’t do and lack of grip.

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Hello guys! I am new here… just have a question is it possible to install adjustable parts (suspension, rollers, diff, and brakes) on Xbox One? And if possible how?

Many thanks in advance.

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^^^ That’s what I’m talking about. :slight_smile:

I can give my own quick rundown of grip tuning (bear in mind this is in perspective of FH3, though it’s essentially the same in FH4):

  1. Install all adjustable parts, as mentioned above: suspension, rollers, diff, and brakes. Most cars do fine with stock brakes especially in class A and lower, but S1/900 and up I always run race brakes at 200%.

  2. Test the car to see how much additional “tire grip” it needs. This is hard to explain, it’s essentially the feel of the car’s tires. You get a feel for it over time. If the car slides/drifts too easily (and/or can maintain a drift without you purposefully trying to maintain the drift yourself), it’s gonna need quite a bit more tire grip. For me, there’s a clear difference between slides running all compounds, even sport tire slide and race tire slide. Some cars, namely mid and rear engine ones, don’t necessarily need race tires. Most of the time I can squeak by with the widest sport tires. However in class A and under… I argue street (or even sometimes stock) compound works fine. Depending on the car and your class goal, you can usually slap on the widest race tires and stay within S1/900.

  3. If RWD, start with this:

-2.0 camber front
-1.0 camber rear
0.1 toe out front
-0.5 toe in rear
front rollers softer than rear; use proportion matching the car’s weight distribution
front springs softer than rear; again, use that same proportion
damping; same proportion
brakes; adjust as needed if applicable
25% rear diff accel
65% rear diff decel

If AWD, add:

5% front diff accel
0% front diff decel
95% rear biased (power split; essentially you want to keep it as rear-biased as possible)

  1. Test it again. If it’s not jolting into corners, more negative camber in front, less in rear (towards zero). soften the front roll/spring/damp (all of them). Doing this to extremes causes instability in general, so find where the breaking point is and keep all the front just above that. If it’s wildly jerking into corners so hard you begin to slide, you can do a few things: take away the 0.1 toe out front, lower the negative rear camber (towards zero), lower the front negative camber (towards zero), decrease rear accel lock (depending on your throttle control skill). Learning to tune takes time. It took me a lot of time. Been tuning since 2016 and only gotten to a point where I sort of know what I’m doing within the past year or so. It all comes with time.

Throwing on an AWD conversion helps with grip, but generally turns every car into a barge and (from my experience) requires extensive tuning, upwards of half an hour, to get a manageable car back. Now, rally tuning is a different animal. I use AWD conversions almost universally in rallying (beyond higher end A/800, at least; lower end A/800, B/700, C/600, and D/500 to be honest if you learn the car you won’t need the AWD swap, especially if it’s FWD stock). For that, the same process as asphalt RWD except closer to mid-bias power (80% rear is a good start) and overall stiffer suspension across the board.

Like I said, it all comes with time, but that’s a short rundown of my usual tuning routine for RWD asphalt grip.

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Ahh another tuning question. Tuners will chime in with all kinds of methods and they will vary from person to person. For instance what has been suggested is a pretty good foundation and will work for them and sometimes will work for others. I on the other hand, take a different approach.

While the upgrades they suggested are pretty spot on by making everything more linear and easier, IE driveline, clutch, flywheel ect, this all makes the engine more responsive and the car to shift faster while taking the load off of the engine so to speak. This will make the car inherently faster without adding any HP/TQ to the car.

Suspension set ups alone can change how the entire car handles for anything. And people have different tuning recommendations based on what they are tuning. For instance a drifter will want more soft settings where a street racer wants a more aggressive set up. The thing is, I tune all of my cars main platform the same exact way. As in, what I call a 0 balance of the car. I actually made a calculator for the public to make this easier. What this does is it evens the weight of the car all around so that you get less body roll and more grip to the wheels. Now, this isn’t an exact science because of how Forza has their tuning set ups, but it actually works for the physics and how the game is ran. Basically, it’s a few mathematical formula’s that are inputted in figuring out your spring rate, rebound stiffness, bump stiffness and anti roll bars for the front and back. For instance the front may be stiffer than the rear to counterbalance the weight of the engine in a front engine vehicle. This has been tested and used for several generations of Forza, which also includes the motorsports series as well. And there is a huge difference in the way a vehicle can handle by just doing this alone.

Tires and wheels will always be a discussion. Why? because certain things are actually better than others because of how the arcade piece of this game works. Hence why many people use to run Drag tires for drift cars. Now, where I would disagree with from above is the wheel size. Yes, wheel size does add weight, but where the difference comes in is for tire deformation. This also works for your normal car as well. For instance, if you went to your car and checked the optimal PSI on a car, it’s generally around 33 PSI for the car itself. This means that you will get optimal performance on a daily drive at that temperature. Well, when you drive aggressively, the PSI tends to change in the tire. Lower pressures initially will become optimal as the tire heats up. If you started at optimal and drove aggressively, the PSI will increase and you will get a “balloon” effect on the tire. What this does is actually give you less tire contact to the group which gives you less grip. But not enough PSI can make your car work harder to get it to rotate. This is where the rim size changes everything. If you notice, when your wheel gets larger, the tire has less depth. so going from that 16 inch wheel size to the 20 inch wheel size you will see a massive difference in the actual tire itself. With less depth in the tire, the tire does not fluctuate as much from the tire pressure, which means you will get more available tire grip to your car. This can be seen in a 1000 HP car being in 4th gear on stock size wheels with race tires, vs maximized wheel size and race tires. The stock size will actually lose grip more often at the same PSI as the max wheel size. This is because the fluctuation is different and the tire patch will show that the stock wheel has less contact, thus giving less grip. This is also why you see a lot of drift car set ups using maximum wheel size because we want max grip while cornering.

Once you have the base car set up, you can do 1 of two things. You can mess with the gearing to make it faster while handling the new changes, or add some beef to the engine. I would say do a weight reduction but this could move your car class to an undesired rank that you are not looking for. For instance, adding 100HP and 60TQ to a car that is already light and agile to keep it in a A class would be better than adding a weight reduction with no upgrade and boost it to a possible S class, which can happen, especially with tire changes.

Engine tuning is generally a lot of people’s last steps since it usually requires the most work and is often not even done by people. I choose to move the final drive most of the time instead of setting up my gears from 1-4, or whatever.

A good thing to do is make friends with someone who does basic tuning and read on what things do and how it changes the car itself. This is where a lot of tuners started, by doing their research. I can sit here and show you what to change, and tell you why I do it, but it might not be very helpful to you if all I do is drift and can only tune to drift per say. Hope this helps and good luck.

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Thank you all for your replies!

I have recently been playing FM3, and still run into the same core problem I described in my original post here. I will go through each of the replies above and try the suggestions. I’d really like to learn the basics of this. I saw a few HokiHoshi videos that seem helpful. I usually try to make a change, one at a time, it doesn’t fix the problem, and have difficulty even determining if it’s better or worse. I mean if you run a lap and change something, then run it again, how do you know your better time is because of the change, or simply because you just ran it faster after learning the track in mostly the same exact car and it’s fresh on your mind? This distinction is extremely difficult for me as a player to pinpoint and determine. It is very difficult for me to say, this tune is better than that one, and just assume I didn’t mess up driving. I can’t ignore there’s a better tune that will enable better times, even beyond crippling understeer in stock. All this talk about “whatever suits your subjective driving style” I don’t understand. My particular driving style is, whichever tune enables the fastest possible time. Objectively, some will be better than others, right? I feel like I’ll figure out how to get the top time one way or the other, but I just suck at tuning. I could just be compensating, adjusting to it subconsciously. That’s cool that the game allows sharing of tunes; it helps me appreciate what you guys can do.

I am coming to understand a Forza game as less of a, try-to-drive-fast game, and more of a, How-make-car-turn, game. Understeer or whatever problem in a stock car exists from the start, and it’s my job as the player to diagnose and figure out which setting in the complex myriad of choices will do any good about it to fix that basic problem. I’m terrible at this, and for some people apparently it all just clicks. I try going through a setting, one at a time, but it’s even hard for me to tell what exactly changed and even if it’s better or worse than it was before. Instinctually, I feel like I just have to do the best with what I’ve got. It’s obvious I’d be getting better times without the understeer or whatever, but when I go into tuning there’s just so many options. Also, I will change something, it doesn’t solve the problem and I wonder, well do I go back and reverse the change before moving on to the next setting?

I tried the Koenigsegg for the R2 single player races, and it felt like cheating. I kept its PI down with putting heavy rims on it to put a centrifugal in it, and just flew ahead of all the other cars. For R3, the Bugatti Veyron was similar. (In FH1, I put a centrifugal in one particular car and won single player races two classes above it! Maybe that was a bug.) I’m now going through R1 races with the Peugeot, but in none of these have I come up with much of a decent tune. I usually leave downforce maxed out, maybe not for the speed tracks. Amalfi Coast was a little ridiculous in R1 though.

btw FM3’s music doesn’t seem anywhere near as good nor plentiful as FM2 and FH1’s. It’s downright discouraging when I think about it-- “I wanna be traaaaash”, “tick tick boom” (one of the better tracks but let’s distract me about blowing up my car please), etc.