After spending a good amount of time tuning and building in the Motorsport series I found general trends in building for grip/accel cars which tend to make up most of the leaderboard and lobby cars.
I’m not certain what to favor in Horizon. I’m still don’t know of what’s best, weight, tires, or power. In Motorsport (in most cases) weight reduction is most important along with tunable chassis and handling parts, followed by tires to a point (usually you’re going for an approximate handling benchmark appropriate for the class), full aero, and then HP and slight weight tweaks to fill out remaining PI. Use OP engine swaps and aspiration conversions when possible.
As best I can tell in FH4 it’s:
AWD swap (near necessary for general all arounders)
Max or near max rear tire width (usually doesn’t cost much PI)
No front tire width
Rear aero or no aero on lower class cars. Front aero seems to cost too much PI. Aero is not that effective and costs too much PI in lower classes and speed is too important.
After that is where it gets fuzzy to me. Should I be going for weight reduction, tire upgrades, or power? The general feel I get is weight reduction > power > tires. What have you guys found? I’m just going for general strong lobby cars and all arounders.
Unless I’m going full Clarkson, or making something particular, I start tuning from right to left. Beginning with engine, drivetrain, body kit, etc., and then moving onto aero and so forth and so on. Depending on the class I’m shooting for, I try to allow enough PI for AT LEAST a cam shaft upgrade along with a couple other small-ish ones. When it comes to the motor upgrades, I just test stuff out to get the most bang for my buck. I’ve found that dropping a fairly significant amount of weight negates adding so much power that the car rides the edge of stability in regards to using more than half throttle in the first 2-3 gears. I like a nice balance. To sum it up, your general feeling is correct.
I work mostly in the lower classes, and FH4 has been much more enjoyable than FH3.
I’m sore we don’t have class based rivals yet mind, for testing and competition, but that’s another issue.
So far nearly all my builds have- many the same as you-
AWD swap
Max or near max rear tire
No front tire width
Rear aero, tuned nearly all the way down
Tire upgrade, often vintage race
Race Diff
Rally springs, stiffened and ride height lowered, -1.0 -0.5 camber as a starting point
Tunable suspension, front end softened
Weight reduction
Race brakes
Exhaust upgrades
That’s my base.
With engine swaps I’m using the I6 engine, and the old standard V8 swap for cars going higher up.
I’m Occasionally adding a turbo, race gearbox, and cams, other engine upgrades
One thing I am noticing is that tuning seems to be making less of a performance difference that in FH2 or FH3.
Cars really aren’t very sensitive to tuning in FH4. It’s all about the build. You really just need to make sure you don’t bottom out on braking and turning, and that your diff settings make for a fast but drama free exit out of turns. They don’t react much to other inputs, and often need major adjustments to feel a difference.
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