Well, now that we’ve had a few days to drive and tune, what are your impressions?
Is it just me, or do the cars seem easier to drive? I’ve been mostly focused on the musclecar series, but it seems remarkable the amount of grip you get with the narrowest tires! I almost never used those in FM6, and if I did, the car was like driving on banana peels! LOL! But here, geez, everything feels quite good and stable. And the default tunes seem really good…I mean REALLY good! The Forza BRZ car that you get early in the campaign, wow, to me you really don’t have to do much of anything to it! Also, the lower levels of brakes seem to provide excellent stopping power. With the musclecars, it seems that with just sport suspension and brakes, you have a really good car on your hands. I just tried a '69 Nova with a setup like that last night with just the default tuning values and it was really good!
Interesting, I don’t think I’ve even tried any cars with the exception of the Demo cars and showcases. Guess I"ll have to give the OG setups a try based on what you are saying. Thanks for the heads up.
I am with you here, the cars do seem a bit more forgiven to drive. My process is building a few cars first, then going back to tune later… because it takes a while to find the right balance of parts. In FM7, I find the cars are totally derivable before even a light tune. I’m not too angry at it… because as I dial in the tunes, I notice my lap times dropping as I get more aggressive with the car as a result of the tune. So far so good.
AWD car seem to be super effective so far, almost like FM3 days…
SnowmansDad, one of the first events I ran was with the Audi S1 and it was pretty much driveable from the word go with only dropping the tyre pressures to 28.5 front and rear.
I tried the Audi S1 last night. Very nice! That is with no tuning…just running as is. As people have been mentioning, with a little fine tuning, things will even get better. Really looking good!
I tried one of the V8 Supercars (PepsiMax) last night, and the 60’s F1 Lotus. These will do better with a little tuning, but are really fun to drive anyway. The Supercar felt a little softly sprung and of course that 2nd gear wants to spin the tires off the car, as usual. The Lotus probably needs a little less accel on the diff, but handling was very good. I can see some really good racing with these bad boys.
I spent some time with the Lambo Miura last night…Saaa-Weet! And then more laps running my GTO at Road America. Man, that does NOT get old!
Another one that I’ve found pretty easy to drive is the WTCC Honda Civic. I can’t remember what I changed, maybe ARBs to about 21.7 and 18.3 and tyre pressure, but again doesn’t need much doing to it. Even finding the Chevy NASCAR pretty fun to drive
I’ll check out the WTCC Honda Civic when I get one. I just got the M&M NASCAR last night. I’ll give it a try. I actually enjoyed the handling of these in FM6. They were good even with the default tune. And once you applied a great tune to them, like one of FOOT’s…excellent!
Had fun last night running a NASCAR series with the M&M car. Very fun! And that new cockpit view, the one that looks up and magnifies the view out a little, is GREAT on these cars! In FM6, I would often run “over the hood” view so that I could see. The same with the V8 Supercars. So this new cockpit view is a nice addition. Man, during some of the races, I felt a level of control inching through the pack of cars that was just so addicting.
I also did that Corvette C7R endurance showcase at Spa. Man, that car also drives great in stock form! I don’t remember it being that balanced (stock) in FM6.
I’m loving the physics/handling package of FM7, best since FM4. No more slippy slidey crap of the last two games, makes it easy to race hard. Haven’t really done any tuning yet, just improving the auto homologated builds.
I am with FOOT on this one. Though I’ve tuned a handful of cars to get them a little more under my satisfaction and enable my life to be a little easier on some of the career runs. At this point in time for FM6, I had practically tuned just about every car that I had in my garage. In addition, I have changed ALL my default homologated builds and found the cars to be a TON better by doing so.
Yeah, I’ve found some homologated builds with clutch upgrades! So you really need to look at these pretty close. And as I mentioned, it seems you can get away with much narrower tires. Also, I find the displays a little quirky for each part category. Like when you enter, let’s say, transmission. FM6 always selects what your build is using. But FM7 will show you something different very often. Sometimes it shows the stock part selected, sometimes something else. It is a little confusing, but I’ll get used to it.
I get confused with this ALL the time, not sure why it highlights the stock, versus the actual selections you’ve already made. At my age and vision, I can use ALL the HELP I can get…lol…
My personal policy is that I do not pre order, so I’ve only had a couple of hours. I went with the F50 as my first car and it’s the only one I’ve messed with. It wasn’t particularly tough to drive in FM6, although with the race suspension upgrade some curbs could send it spinning if you didn’t increase the spring rate or raise the ride height, but it does feel nice to drive. One thing that stood out to me messing around in the tuning menu was that this time instead of bump damping being way too high and rebound being about right, bump starts close to right and rebound is too low. The car felt better after bringing the rebound up, and this particular car seems happier with higher spring rates.
Also, I need to test this, but unless Suzuka’s track camber is so much more aggressive than other tracks, I noticed that the suspension compressed a lot more after I added aero. Maybe they upgraded this part of the game so you have to consider downforce when it comes to spring rates? I’ll perform a back to back test on the same track later, but if true that’d be really awesome.
I have messed pretty much only with homologation builds, and most of the time I can fit race suspension without losing anything really valuable, Althuogh on some cars I have runs silly large rims.
Other than that I’m happy that the sim steering inst super twitchy as it was in FM5 and 6, so I’n finally back in Sim steering. That’s how I drove in FM4, Olthuogh I cant say I mastered it, sometimes it does twitch on me, and send me spinning,unless I’m in FWD, and on AWD it’s very rare unless I have tried to pull silly drift and gotten way too much angle. And of course RWD twitches sometimes but I would guess I get a hold of it with bit more practice.
The cars drive quite well on sport supension, and on some cars stock seems to be quite enough, as long as I have ARB’s and Diff installed.
I havnt really niticed any significant preference towards any drive type, and usually run with what the car comes with.
Definitely more grip. Very noticeable with P class, early prototype cars.
In FM6 turning traction control off in P class was not an option for 99.9% of people.
Homologation drops max HP a bit but still a very noticeable difference from FM6. Trick in FM6 was to limit TC kicking in. Now it hardly registers and I have turned it off in most cases.
I agree with comments re stock tunes also. Generally the base tuning and grip levels will give more people access to quicker lap times.
Notable exception in my case were the Formular E Cars. Horrible in stock tune. Oh and that Porsche in the demo!