I was busy…fine tuning my Chevy Vega a few days ago and decided to test drive it at the car meet near the airport…there was like 3 or 4 Dodge Dart R/T’s there to drag race…all of those cars were S 2 classes with obvious V 12 swaps…most of the racers had problems…keeping the cars straight…so it got me to thinking …most racers value horsepower because that means speed in most cases but I feel like without proper handling and control in addition to keeping the car lightweight as possible…your tune is basically flawed and you are basically making the car a one trick pony and in most cases, borderline useless…so the question is what do you concerntrate on when you are tuning…what is most important to you?
In FH3 power is king in the vast majority of cases, even on circuits.
In FH2 more balanced tunes were the way to go.
The PI system in FH3 punishes handling way too much.
With regards to what is important to me its laptime and that often means maxed out engine with as little handling as possible in this game.
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I would agree that people believe and too many people do use power is king in FH3. But power is useless when you crash every corner and can’t keep the car straight or even on the track. The PI system is a joke, with some cars jumping from a B class to a high S1 class just by going from stock tires to street tires. Other cars, mostly old muscle cars, don’t have this problem but that is few and far between. I am very competetive online with my tunes, I concentrate on handling and power. You don’t neccesarily need 1200 hp in a B class car, you can usually drop that down to about 7 or 800 hp with good torque and upgrade your handling.
To be quick in FH3 you need to understand that power is king, then learn how to tune it and learn how to drive it.
While the cars that the HLC crowd put in top 5 may be harder to handle than others they are not impossible to drive smooth online. You can even drop a second or two to calm the driving down and still smash the so called balanced cars without bouncing off walls etc
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Of course there’s still some sort of balance required. Still I wouldn’t consider 800hp sub 0.85g B-Class car to be balanced in real-world/general terms by any means 
What do you value for you playing experience? Maybe you’re playing to be competitive online or just playing for a great driving experience.
When I play with friends or random sessions, I go with the controller and just about any tune with high power I download works. That’s just to be competitive and level out the playing field.
When I play by myself, I just relax and enjoy driving in cockpit view. Those aforementioned tunes don’t work anymore, since I don’t anticipate turns with the luxury of chase cam, and it comes down to reaction and handling/grip to get me through the corners.
I recently got a friend who likes the game to play online with me, but then stopped playing because it wasn’t fun since he was performing badly. I convinced him to download certain tunes and he was happily racing and back in the game again. He uses a controller.
There’s nothing wrong with making tunes the way you prefer, but if you want to be competitive, just go with the flow, it’s still just as an arcade racer, players want to go fast and have fun.
In the Motorsport series, I’d generally focus on handling and acceleration. In Horizon 3 I had to change tactics because a minor tire upgrade would shoot the PI up ridiculously, so it’s just power first and foremost.
A twin turbo V12 and AWD swap.
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You have a choice go for power and run the difficulty setting higher or go for handeling and drop the difficulty setting. Is how this game works now as it is the way most players tune so the Drivertar follow suite.
I perfer handeling over power AWD, Tyres upgraade, suspension, brakes, weight, clutch, gearbox, diff, then spend rest of PI pints to max out for that class on Power.
Great feedback…so far …not as many responses as I hoped…I like racing in A class with cars that have a power spec of between 7.5 to 8.0…B class is usually over 5.0 to 7.0…S1 should be over 8.0 and as close to 9…S2…should be over 8.5 and as close to 10 as possible…to be honest, I think A class is ideal for racing…B is a little too slow…once you go over S1…you can only control the car but so much…once you hit 180 to 200 mph…in most races…that is hard to maintain…with curves and jumps…different terrain…but like I said before…I am still learning how to fine tune these cars…a lot of trial and error situations!
Too much … way too much … u totally underestimated what we’re referring to as “FH3 needs power”.
Grab a BRZ/Toyota GT86, max out its stock engine and keep stock tire compound and upgrade the rest for A-Class. U should be at ~6.6 handling and that’s what I would consider as BALANCED A-Class car. Yes it wouldn’t feel exactly pleasant to most myself included.
S1 Balance I personally would go somewhere 7.4-7.6.
And AWD is must for most cars, because they f**ked up the FH3 PIs for AWD as well.
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A class, Ok… First things first; largest rear tire width, 4wd swap, engine swap if needed, supercharger, race suspension, race roll bars, race weight reduction, race diff. Then add power until you get to about 3-5PI before the class limit. then add various combos of the things i haven’t mentioned yet. rims, clutch, drive shaft, race trans, stiffening & brakes to get the most out of the particular car you are tuning.
As for fine tuning open trajectory by holding down on the D-pad(xbox one). Then tab over to the tires misc and one more over to the heat tab. These two tabs together give you the info needed to properly set your camber and tire pressure. Ideally, the tires will be clear. However, you need camber to turn, especially in the front wheels. So don’t get carried away with getting the temps even across the front tires, a 20-30 sometimes even 40 degree difference is ok as long as the car handles well.
I start my anti roll bar tuning at 20 front 65 rear and adjust from there. In this game the rear anti roll bars can be set to max in about half the cars. I start it out at max and move it back by 5 points if the rear end is too wiggley, or I notice the inside tire lift. I’ve gone as low as 50 and that was for a lightweight rally car.
I put a car top 100 yesterday in a career event with no tuning whatsoever. It was an older model DLC land rover.
I tuned a 800 or so hp awd HSV (can’t remember model) and it drove well. In lobbies I destroyed everyone until the 1,000hp plus cars came out. I was better driver around corners and squeaked a win but their cars were far better and caught me rapidly towards the end in the less technical sections. These werent world beater drivers…just average. They could however drive without wreaking into everything.
Moral of story is upgrades are better than the tune.
The physics are such that you don’t really need to spend a lot of effort tuning to go fast. Almost all cars drive good once awd swapped.
Power is king. If you can’t drive, all the grip in the world still won’t help ya.
S1 8XXhp HSV is handling build.
And I wouldn’t say for sure others have 1000hp. Power figures can only serve as rough references in this game.
Many supercars in mid-800hp range can out-accelerate the 1000hp HSVs at higher speeds(though partially due to weight of HSVs). Many muscle cars are “power evaporators” that don’t accelerate at all even at 1000hp, with the exception of the old Dart which accelerates like no tomorrow even at 800hp.
Blizzard mountain tune with V12 + awd + i think transmission. The car does accelerate pretty darn good thanks to the twin turbo at high speeds. Didn’t have the V8 issues of not great top end. I didn’t do max power and instead did more handling than normal.
The cars that almost beat me were cars that have much lower starting PI and likely could fit more power with tires. I had the gas mashed and they were still pulling hard. Only way that is possible is with a ton of HP and maybe less weight. Pretty sure your typical farm truck can only go that fast with maxed out lambo motors
To me it’s all relative. I’ve driven tunes by most that have replied and they all have their own little flavor but all very good at what they do, so to me that counts as good tunes.
On the other hand, you have different fingers.
Sorry. Couldn’t resist. But really, the flip side and what my point is, is that I have a bunch of drag cars tuned for 1/4 mile along with some good street RWD tunes that I would consider good tunes. Not gonna be the fastest around a circuit but good for what they’re designed to do.
That’s just my thought on this.
I have 5,000 tune sales and i make off-road, rally and circuit tunes. I tune my cars for handling. My circuit tunes are designed for racing circuits, not hitting 270 mph on a 6 mile speed-run on the highway. Their is very little races in the game with 2 mile straightaways, so handling matters more. My tunes maybe go 20 mph less, but handling way better. The biggest mistake people do is stripping the Aero for more speed. My tunes have really good handling because of this. All the time i see tunes with no sales because they advertise it for speed, not circuit or racing. since i get around 3 uses for every tune i sell (That means people buy the tune, and maybe take it off and re-apply 3 times) i have made around 3.75 million credits from making tunes.
Tuning is hard to learn, and all the time i see people just fully max it out and sell it without tuning. Anyone can make a paint design but it takes a lot more to tune. Thats why a good tune is worth a lot.
What I have noticed in this game is that if you go for handling you obviously require some skills behind the wheel, because you can also tune for speed and catch up on the straights even if you’re an inferior driver. However, I believe the elite guys are more than capable of handling unbalanced, overpowered cars in the corners, especially due to the abuse of AWD (biggest issue with power is corner exit of course).
If the AWD conversion wasn’t so good and so widespread I don’t think this would be possible at all. If you go all power on stock tires in lower classes for example your traction on corner exit will be atrocious and your car will have terrible handling at higher speeds. Alas, AWD fixes the corner exit issue without hindering high speed handling very much, making it viable to add unrealistic levels of power while staying with the stock tires, which allows you to have power beyond what your class was supposed to encompass without the disadvantages of it.
To balance AWD I think Turn10 needs to severely restrict it and also make it even heavier. Perhaps a comprehensive revision of the physics engine with regards to AWD is required as well. IRL the AWD systems tend to lose speed when the car goes fast enough due to bigger drivetrain losses than equivalent RWD drivetrain, even though they launch a lot better. This could make RWD cars more competitive on Goliath and other high speed courses.
This happened in FM3. The fix was when you upgrade, awd adds PI. This was implemented in FM4 and still in use today. However in FH3 they reverted to making awd swap super easy to drive similar to FM3. Previously awd swap resulted in a super sluggish and understeering pig.
Even with improved handling, awd swap is only a somewhat minor problem.
The big problem is the insane penalty for handling upgrades and almost no PI penalty for excessive power upgrades. How this wasn’t notice in testing is beyond me and inexcusable. The result is return of missle car PI insanity from FM2.
FH3 PI calculations are basically the rehashing of major FM2 and FM3 PI issues combined.
Literally the amount of stupid when it comes to this issue is unbelievable. Never thought I’d see missle awd swap monsters.
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I see. I’m new to Forza. 
We don’t even have to go online to witness it. In last Midnight Battle your opponent is a maxed out Murciélago SV. That car is absolutely atrocious in the corners, but the last section is a long straight and, no matter how far ahead you are, he’ll catch up in time for a dramatic finish. This sort of thing makes me believe Turn10 and PG actually intended for the game to be like this! Which is a bit annoying because RWD cars with good handling are much more fun to drive in the game.
When it comes to tire upgrades, I believe the PI increase is somewhat realistic, though it could be less. Old tires were junk compared to what we have today, which is why in historic racing they ban modern tires. I maintain the problem is the imbalance of AWD, because RWD cars are dependent on good tires to have traction out of corners.