I’ve got tuning down pretty good, but I’m just curious to how you pros buy your upgrades and what order you think is most important? For example in an A class lobby, Here’s how I would do mine:
Race Tires
Rear Tire Width
Front tire width
Lightest rims
Upgrade both rim sizes fully
Front and rear downforce items
Race Transmission
Race Differential
Brakes
Springs
Both anti roll bars
Centrifugal supercharger
Exhaust tips
Air filter
And if I have any room after that, I usually get little things like the flywheel, driveline, or a race clutch. Now is there anything majorly wrong with that, like would it be beneficial to go with full weight reduction and leave out something else? Thanks
In this game since they’ve done all the new tire work, I’ve found that tires use up a lot of PI points and aren’t always as beneficial as putting something else on in their place and for this reason I tend to look at them near the end. Too large of a rim can cause handling issues, but so can rims that are too large. On older vehicles with tiny rims, I tend to increase them in size but you want a good ratio without too much or too little sidewall so that your car handles well. When upgrading my cars, I tend to focus on tuning and handling before raw power so this is the steps I usually take:
Front and Rear aero
2 Way Differential
Race Brakes
Race Suspension
Race Front and Rear Sway Bars
Then, depending on what class I need to be in and how many PI Points I have to play with I will look at the following and make a calculated choice between either Sport or Race upgrades:
Roll Cage
Weight Reduction
Transmission
After this, I will check the tire compound and size to see how many PI points it takes to upgrade. Typically, for the Leagues I have left most cars on stock or Street Tire Compound. I then check the tire width, and usually I up it one notch if it doesn’t hit the PI Points too much. Really though, I base it on the final level the vehicle needs to be and whether for that particular car I need more help with the handling (in which case I upgrade the tire width) or if I need more help with power (in which case I don’t).
Finally, I come to engine upgrades. I really base my upgrades on a few things I read in Slave Munky’s old tuning calculator upgrades chart.
If possible and seeing on how it changes the power/torque curves and if I like it - Highest possible Turbo- Super- charger
Highest Camshaft
Highest displacement
Then I just add engine upgrades that provide the best combination of power gain and weight drop while keeping under my PI limit. When I have only 1 or 2 possible points left I look at the following 4 upgrades:
Flywheel
Clutch
Driveline
Rims
Definatly going to test your method. The way I upgrade is usually good enough to finish in the top 30% of every race, but I always look to improve so that I can keep up with those guys that are leveled 1000 and higher, since they are seemingly unbeatable. Thank you and nice information!
Full disclosure: I have done some online multiplayer, but I mainly do career as of right now. I got the game and played a bit, and then shelved it, now that I’ve brought it back out recently, I’m attempting to finish the career leagues (no bonus events yet) before busting out some rivals and hotlaps.
The hotlapping and rivals that I have done, my upgrades and tunes have worked well for me.
For me always brakes, springs, ARB and diff to race to allow full tweaking of the chassis. Then weight reduction and/or tyre compound. Only then touch the engine with intake or exhaust first for a better noise
Now that you got me looking around for my cars, I’m having a hard time finding them all. With designs and layer groups, you can go to the Paint section in FM5 and there is a tab for “my Designs” and “My Vinyl Groups”. Is there something somewhere in the game to find all of your tunes (as in previous titles) and if not, WHY NOT?!
It’s sort of hidden, but go to the upgrade menu. Straight from there, press the “select” (for lack of a better word) button on your controller, at least it was called the select button on the 360. There, it should give you the option of loading, saving, or defaulting a tune. Go to load tune and your saved tunes should be there.
I know about this menu, but sadly, it only shows if you have any tunes saved for the car you are currently in. I was asking more in regard to the paint menu where it shows all the paints, or in this case all the tunes, for every vehicle that I have saved. Otherwise, like right now, where I am looking for a tune and can’t remember the car I have to go through every built A Class car I have until I find the right car.
Here check out this link. Builds are quite simple if u know what grip or accel you are looking for. Do the basics first to get your desired grip or accel after u have done the weight reduction. Never us a clutch or flywheel if u can go lighter with your rims or driveshaft.
I don’t have one universal routine. Rather, what I upgrade depends on the car; on what I feel that it needs. There’s not much point going through increasing the handling on a car that’s already leaning pretty heavily towards handling, for example, and I don’t want to dump a bunch of power into something that’s already powerful but handles like a three-legged pig. No matter what, however, I start with my tunable upgrades - race suspension, front and rear roll bars, brakes, transmission if useful for the car, differential, and maybe aero. (I run with simulated damage, so aero is great right up until you lose the front or rear aero due to a collision, at which point I’m either heavily oversteering or massively understeering.)
I tune for R class so almost every upgrade is available for some of the cars. For those that are not I go with areo, springs, arbs, brakes, weight reduction if it’s allowed, tire width, tire compound, rims, transmission (I find sport transmission is almost always good enough) 2 way, driveline, clutch, and then if there is room engine parts last. My personal preference is to never use inter cooler or oil upgrade most the time it adds more weight than HP and on few occasions I will add a roll cage
Don’t use Clutch/Flywheel upgrades. If you need one or two points, do driveline or lighter rims.
Don’t use Camshaft except for rare occasions when you need that extra RPM range, or sometimes in lower classes.
Weight reduction is good, lighter is faster.
A good way to figure out what to add is to tune 30-50 points below your target, such as put the car around 550-570 if going for B600. Test drive it and find out what it needs. If you need grip, add tires. If you have enough grip, add some more power or weight reduction or something. There’s really not TOO many absolutes, a lot is left to trial and error and testing what works and what doesnt.
Why should you not add the camshaft? Is there something else or a combination of something else you would recommend instead - assuming I do want to add engine upgrades? Often times, I enjoy the added RPM range, especially when tuning for C or B class? When looking at engine upgrades, I used to use Slave Munky’s priority upgrade table and so that’s why I typically default to the camshaft? Hopefully you can explain to me your reasoning and I can learn a bit and maybe try out some new things.
I do know that htye reduce torque slightly, but for the league play, the loss of torque is insignificant for the tracks and amount of laps even on Pro difficulty. As you said in bold, I guess that first of all, I must go back and re-read Worm’s tuning guide sitting on my computer, and second, learn how to tune my gearbox. I suck at tuning it and have so far only been tuning the final drive ratio. The only reason I put on a Race Transmission is to get 6 gears for cars that otherwise have 4 or 5.
As others have mentioned, later today, I will build a car with two identical setups however one will have the cam and the other won’t as far as engine upgrades go. Then I will tune then and post some lap times up here for various tracks. Should I use the CSC instead of the cam or should I stick to no aspiration conversions? The car I will be using is more likely than not a Ferrari Dino but I will take a request or two to test this out…
Most of the advice you are getting is for competitive leaderboard and multiplayer cars. Its doesn’t really matter all that much how you build more career mode races since those cars aren’t tuned and usually aren’t built well.
There’s nothing wrong with 4 or 5 gears. I have an Oldsmobile running stock 3 gears that tears up lobbies for example. In FM4 my buddy came up with a 2 gear belair that demolished lobbies and ran top 100s. Race transmission isn’t that important because it uses so much pi. You are better off using that extra pi on something else unless the gearing is just bad!
Front tire width is also not important. All it does is make the car stiff up front if you make them too big.
Csc is better than cam because in the majority of tracks you want killer acceleration out of the corner. Top end is not that important even on most big tracks (except Lemans). All cams do is provide top end power which you rarely tap in to and when you do, you’re better off in a csc car because a csc car makes up more time around the entire track.
I’ve tested identical cars with near identical handling and a cam car flys on the straights but overall the csc car stays ahead the entire lap. The corner out acceleration in a lower hp csc car just stomps on a slightly higher hp cam car. That’s not to say a cam car is slow, its just not the best option with how this game rates pi. The cam car was still pulling low end top 100s so it would still torch a lobby and career mode players.
Thank you. I will definitely try it out for myself, but that makes sense.
If you’re attempting to build a car and engine or aspiration conversions are not permitted, car does not have a CSC upgrade available, or it takes you out of the needed class, what would you recommend?
I depends again on what u are looking for. If aspiration takes u over your PI cap tan so will a camshaft most likely. I would just build it with out the cams or the aspiration or remove some grip to get that aspiration in there. I personally want power over grip for this 1 reason. I can tune grip into the car but I can’t tune horsepower and torque into it. Give me the power and i will get it to turn lol.
Bingo. Its all about getting the car to handle good enough. Else, I’d try to make it a killer grip tune that will likely get bogged down in traffic or a momentum tune for tracks like Indy or the Alps where you can get away with some interesting builds.
I like the upgraded cam for the fact less gear changes means less time lost shifting, which is why the upgraded clutch is good to cause when you going for a pass changing gear can sometimes kill you.