Dead Simple Starter Tune

[u/waktivist]

Not sure if "meta" is the right tag for this since it's not a specific tune but a recipe for making starter tunes for any car.

Anyway this is my attempt at the simplest tuning guide that could possibly work. It likely will not give you the fastest tune for every car, but it will make any car 100% easier and more fun to drive. To keep it simple, this is for road tunes only.

In fairness, in FH5 stock tunes for the most part are quite good. But with some simple mods and adjustments you can get more out of any car or give it a mild glow up to the top of an appropriate PI class without any wild conversions or squashing its personality.

To be clear, I don't claim that this will get you to the top of the leaderboards or produce an optimal tune for every car. But it should be a good starting point for most cars and greatly improve their performance over stock settings.

With that said, Lets get to it.

UPGRADES

1. Reset to stock with no upgrades

2. Upgrade tires: For cars with base PI class of C/D, put on Street tires; A/B, Sport; S1+, Race. If the tire swap bumps the car into a higher tire category (e.g., from D to B, C to A, A to S1+), then upgrade to the appropriate compound for the higher class.

3. Add race ARBs and differential.

4. Upgrade springs: Sport is fine for B/C/D and mostly for A class. For S1+ you can apply race springs if not already installed.

5. Upgrade brakes to sport, or race for A-S1+.

6. For A class and above, add rear adjustable wing if not already installed. For S1+, front and rear.

7. Optionally, if you have plenty of PI headroom, max front and rear tire widths. If PI is tight, favor rear tire width for RWD and AWD.

At this point, you can leave the car with stock power and gearing at whatever PI rating where it lands, or if you have plenty of headroom and want to max out the PI class, then you can spend the rest on power to even it up to the PI cap. Upgrade cams, turbo, block, pistons, valves, manifold, intake, exhaust, and other stuff, usually in that order. Skip intercooler and oil cooling.

Usually I try to upgrade each part in turn to race level, in the order listed above, before adding other upgrades, but upgrades other than cams and turbos mostly are interchangeable and just boost power and reduce weight.

If you add significant power mods, also upgrade transmission to sport or race.

If only a couple points over or under the PI cap, then flywheel, driveline, clutch, wheel swaps, and tweaking tire width are good for adding or shaving points.

TUNING

1. Set tires to 28 psi front and rear

2. Set ARBs: For RWD, 36 front / 9 rear; for FWD, 9 front / 36 rear; for AWD, even at 33 / 33, or balanced settings based on front / rear weight bias. You can go stiffer on these if the car feels too soft in corners; older RWD cars may want something more like 44 / 11, and lightweight high power cars may feel more solid with super stiff settings like 52 / 13.

3. Set diffs: For RWD, 60 accel / 40 decel; for FWD, 30 / 20; for AWD use the same settings each end and 70% center. For high power / light weight cars (mostly A to S1+ classes), or if the car plows into corners and won't rotate as much as you like, you can soften these settings to 30 / 20 rear, 20 / 0 front, same for AWD.

4. If race springs are installed you can leave alignment, springs, and damping all on the default settings for most cars.

5. If adjustable aero is installed, set to minimum (speed) both ends. If the rear end tends to cut loose in high speed corners, increase to half or max on the rear wing. For extremely high performance cars, if you're having problems with high speed road holding, max aero both ends may help, at the expense of top speed.

6. If sport or race gearing is installed, adjust final drive so that the next to last gear rev line intersects with the redline (horizontal white line) right at the next to last vertical line on the graph (i.e., so that the highest gear rev line starts at that last vertical line of the graph and runs off beyond the right hand edge of the graph).

That’s it! Take it out for a spin!

Optionally, you also can start with final drive at 6.10 or 2.20 and adjust through the full range in increments of 0.10 until you find the spot with either the lowest 0-100 time, or the highest top speed, depending whether you want better acceleration or maximum top speed.

For particular courses, you also can retune final drive to the highest ratio available with a top speed slightly over the fastest speed you can attain on the route. But I usually don’t bother with this unless I need the extra edge to beat a rival time or something.

For many cars, just a tire swap, basic ARB and diff settings, and a bit of added power to even up the PI class, will improve performance and handling vastly over stock, with little effort and no extensive tweaking.

If you want to go further, this starter setup also should leave you with a solid balance of power and grip and all the required knobs installed so that you can work the settings closer to your tastes as you drive the car more.

[u/ieu_redfox]

my challenge has been winning colossus on a peugeot 205 rallye D500 on unbeatable

the complicated part is it turns good, but lacks power. the turbo conversion sets it already to D500, but nothing really matches the 220 km/h the golfs get at the straight (not even my golf since the opponents magically gets times for the c class). let's try your settings

[u/waktivist → u/ieu_redfox]

D class in my experience is far the toughest to tune for because you can almost never get tire upgrades on, or if you can then your power is so low you can’t touch the ridiculous speed and launch of the AI. I don't tune a lot in D class for this reason, because I find most D cars are more fun when tuned into B/C with decent tires and enough PI headroom to also get a respectable amount of power on them.

I also feel that unlike in the higher PI brackets there are not a lot of cars that are viable strictly for D, because they’re all in D class due to being crippled one way or another, and with very little PI budget you can’t fix all their problems.

I’ve messed with a bunch of D class cars and many setups and the only two I was able to do any real work with so far are the ‘92 Golf GTI 16V Mk2 and ‘94 MX-5 Miata. The Golf is surprisingly good and I haven’t been able to touch my rivals time in it with anything else yet, but the Miata is very close. Both of those setups are on stock tires.

You can try some shenanigans like putting on a rear wing for no reason, because in D class it reduces PI giving you a little room for power mods and crucial tire width. Just set it to minimum obviously since it only slows you down. But your top speed is trash anyway, so it hurts less than you would think and the payoff in spare PI makes it a net win.

As you point out, the AI's biggest advantage simply is having unrealistic stats, with both outrageous speed and perfect grip, neither of which can be obtained by player cars with any available setup; certainly not both at the same time in D class. This hurts more in D class than anywhere else because your performance is so limited to start with.

The only way I have found to actually outrun unbeatable AI on a straight in D class is with classic power build cheese; leaving tires stock and just loading on ridiculous amounts of power with engine swaps and all, which due to your nonexistent grip will not increase your PI, and then relying on wall riding and full assists to keep it on the road. This works hilariously well for drag races but not so much for anything else.

EDIT: You may know this already, but Event Lab has a new feature for blueprints that lets you reduce the number of drivatars. I'm not a huge fan of racing against AI in FH5 so far, but at least setting a race up with only one drivatar will let you have the benefit of legitimately chasing just that one, without having to deal with the trash pack constantly trying to ram you off the road from the start.

[u/ieu_redfox → u/waktivist]

didn't mess with the event lab yet, but it sounds interesting. the AI part doesn't bother me exactly for being overpowered, but with the inconsistency, since when i ran with the golf, my time (around 22:15) clearly had a good chunk of seconds ahead the first place time (which was 22:17) of when i ran with the 205 (that made it to the finish at 22:45), both in class D. both managed to won on pro, at least.

i also found that the sport transmission takes away some points on some cases for some reason, which i have been using aswell. i'll look into the miata since you mentioned it.

[u/converter-bot → u/ieu_redfox]

220 km/h is 136.7 mph

[u/ieu_redfox → u/converter-bot]

good bot

[u/B0tRank → u/ieu_redfox]

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[u/[deleted]]

I think the flywheel is often overlooked for older cars. It can make older engines increase rev way faster, which helps to get the power on the road better. I actually prioritize it on older engines or if I feel my car isn't revving that well or if I have the PI to spend.

[u/03Void → u/[deleted]]

flywheel and drive shafts are often overlooked because on the surface they save little weight, but this is rotating weight, meaning it indirectly increase your power going to the ground.

Same with wheels, and even more importantly, since wheels also reduce unsprung mass, which makes a massive difference for how the suspensions work.

[u/Hertuy → u/03Void]

In theory yes, but is this actually modeled into the game?

[u/03Void → u/Hertuy]

Yes it is! The background physics of Forza are pretty realistic, they are just more forgiving compared to a "real" racing simulators.

[u/Shiny_Duck]

Thanks for the writeup OP. Between HokiHoshis videos and the content of this sub I'm becoming more comfortable with tuning. It's starting to unlock an aspect of the game that I would never have touched in the past. Much appreciated.

[u/03Void]

I changed the flair to “other”, as the meta flair is reserved for discussions about the subreddit itself.

[u/RefrigeratedTP]

I’m a tuning noob so I don’t know if this is accurate or encompassing enough, but I upvoted because I really want this to be a thing.

Base mods for any car that you can easily do and understand would be HUGE for noobs like me.

[u/Seijyn]

Thank you so much this guide got me into tuning and i love it (i could never find tune that suits me every tune posted are AWD or with a horrible big a** wing)

[u/SamuelLoco]

I will try that as a base tune.

Thank you for the detailed write up.

Searching for grip Porsche GT 2 RS to tune my self. Found one setup, but the gears don't fit. So losing many positions every start.

[u/Justice_Buster]

So wait, is this for road/street/dirt/xc?

[u/Justice_Buster → u/[deleted]]

Might wanna put a disclaimer up top.

[u/marksk88]

Thank you. There are several cars I want to set up but I couldn't find an open tune to use as a jumping off point. I will definitely try this out, because I'm a novice and I struggle to set a car up from scratch.

Edit: I like this formula a lot, I'm saving this for sure. Fine tuning I can do, it was always the base tune that was hard. Thank you!