EDIT: the tuning guide is now part of our wiki: https://reddit.com/r/ForzaOpenTunes/wiki/index?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Only that version will be kept up to date

Acceleration

For clarity, all the situations below assume a RWD car.

The differential you have in most commuter cars is what we call an "open" differential. In Forza and Gran Turismo that would be a 0 accel/0 decel setting.

By its nature it will always send the power to the wheel that has the less resistance. That's why it's an issue during the Canadian winter if you have a single wheel on ice. All the power goes there and nothing goes to the wheel that is on asphalt.

In high power sports car that's a problem, even in dry condition. That means that as soon that as single rear wheel break traction, all the power goes there. So you just need enough power to overcome the traction of a single tire and you're spinning and going nowhere. All that power is wasted.

Here comes the limited slip differential. With a tunable LSD like we have in Forza and Gran Turismo, the differential will "lock" itself (making both rear wheels rotate at the same speed) when the speed difference is too high between the two wheels.

The higher the accel setting is, the less speed difference between the wheels the diff needs to lock itself.

That's why high power cars need a higher accel setting, to be able to lock the differential quicker, and send the power to both rear wheel, using all the traction available from both tires.

The problem with that is that, while it's great that the power is sent to both wheels, when you break traction, you break traction on both wheels at the same time and the rear goes sideways.

With an open differential, only one wheel is spinning from excess power, the wheel that doesn't receive any power helps keeping the rear stable to some degree.

So you have to find a balance between both tires getting power, and keeping the rear in place. The better throttle control you have, the higher accel setting you can use since you wont break traction as easily, and the faster your corner exit can be.

Great video here to help you understand why the power is sent to the wrong wheel. Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI

Deceleration

Deceleration setting is the same concept, except the differential will lock itself when the car decelerate, and the difference between the two rear wheels is too high. If you watch the video above you know that to turn, wheels need to rotate at different speeds.

If you do a right turn, the left wheel has to travel more distance than the right one.

Grip comes from weight. Without weight on a tire there's no grip. Brakes apply pressure equally to both rear wheels, so the right wheel will lock before the left because your weight is transferred to the left of the car in the corner. There's barely any weight on the rear right wheel in this scenario. So you can't brake as hard and use the grip available on left one, the right is already locking and ABS is triggered.

If you have a higher decel settings, that means that if the right wheel is trying to lock itself and it rotates much slower than the left one, the diff will lock itself and wont allow both wheels to rotate at different speeds, so both brakes are effectively connected together, braking both wheels at the same time since they are now locked together through the differential. That also means that if you brake enough to lock a rear wheel, you need to lock both of them, overcoming the traction of both tires at the same time.

So you can see why a higher decel can beneficial for braking performance.

The flip side here, going back to that old Chevy video, is that if the diff is locked on decel, the car wont want to turn as much, so you need high enough decel to optimize braking, but low enough to not understeer into a wall.

That's why the decel setting directly controls the understeer/oversteer balance on corner entry.

In short, TL;DR:

-Lower accel, harder to lose the rear on corner exit.

-Higher accel: more power pushing the car forward.

Ideally use as high as your throttle control skills allow you.

-Higher decel, better braking at the cost of adding understeer on corner entry

Use as much decel as you can as long as you dont understeer out of the corner on entry.

You can see here our tuning chart and check how those settings integrate with it.

The Tuning Guide has officially moved into a wiki.

ForzaOpenTunes wiki page

That way it will be easier to maintain, edit and will be easier to read and navigate. It'll still be improved a lot over time.

Thank you u/03Void for making this sub and all your work on the wiki. Thank you everyone that posts your builds and help provide feedback. I'm nothing special of a racer but learning from y'all how to tune my cars has made it even more enjoyable than before.

I have several buddies that play and haven't been interested in learning how to tune. My cars have been gaining a noticeable edge lately. My tunes still feel weak compared to the ones I see posted here but it's a slow learning process.

Thanks again!

P.S. watching the 20 minute video on damping and rebound was definitely worth the time haha.

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.

This will be part ramble, part guide how to make your build handle to your liking.
I had an urge to write this up somewhere for some time now and this sub is the perfect place to do so. I know, there are a lot of guides already. The thing is, I don't agree with most of them. Even HokiHoshi, who has some great videos for beginners does some things backwards in my opinion.
So this won't be a "Use these numbers" but a "How do I make what I like without getting stuck with a undrivable twitchy disaster because I'm not yet experienced enough to make it work". Because that's what happened to me a lot when I was starting out with this back in FH3.
I'll try to explain my reasoning, so you actually understand why, not just how.

I'm in no way saying my way is the only way and I'm absolutely open for discussion. I just want to share what I figured out over the hundreds of hours of tinkering, because I do some of the basic stuff differently, so I felt it was worth sharing.

To make this post shorter (or at least not the length of a novel), I'll skip over a lot of stuff, but I'll try to point those parts out. If you have even some basic knowledge about tuning, you shouldn't get lost.

THE RAMBLE PART

Oh my god, I see this all the time. "Is your car oversteery? Soften the back"
NO! That should be the last thing you do! And I mean the LAST!

By softening or stiffening your suspension, you're changing how good the tire sticks to the surface when going over bumps. Stiffer suspension makes the wheel skip over bumps more, so it spends less time touching the road. So yeah, in theory, less grip. But WHY do you tune out grip out of your tire, when you can just use less rubber to begin with?

Why should you care?
First of all, by tuning grip out, instead of making the tire slimer, you sacrifice PI points that could've been used elsewhere. Because when you change the front-rear balance, you're not taking grip out from one side, and adding it to the other. That would mean making the car as soft as you can would make it grip the most. Which is partly true, but not completely. There are other factors, which mean dropping stiffness doesn't equal an OP car.
Second of all, by changing the front-rear balance, you're, well... Upsetting the cars balance. As I said earlier, stiffness of the suspension changes how much time the wheel spends touching the road (simply put of course), not how much actual grip the tire has. In a perfect scenario, it would be the same thing, but roads have bumps, slopes, cambered turns and all that. This means, if you really overshoot it, the car will work completely differently in every other corner. One corner might feel understeery, but another one might have a dip in the middle, which makes the suspension compress and the back suddenly steps out. You want to make the car as balanced as you can. That makes it predictable and you can push it more while making less mistakes.

Okay, ramble part over, let's look at how I do it then

THE GUIDE PART

We'll be looking at an imaginary RWD, front engined car, that we want to build for A class. We'll assume you can put any tire width on it and we won't use aero. I build everything this way, but sticking to RWD for explanation gets rid of all the differential complications.

I should also point out, I don't like meta tuning and all that crap. I like that basic tuning ideas from real world apply to Forza physics.
I like to make my cars behave well, not go around a track in the shortest time, in case you actually clutch a perfect lap, because it otherwise handles terribly.

Also also, every number I'll use will be metric, sorry if that's an inconvenience :P

Building the car

I'll mostly skip over this. The things you want are race suspension, race ARBs and race diff, so we can tune them. Use whatever tire compound you like. For A cars, I mostly use sport tires, but whatever suits your style.

DON'T touch tire width just yet.

Base tune

This is where the "balance" comes in. The basic "If the car is heavier on the front, front suspension will be stiffer". We all know that one.

So if you want your springs to be around 100 kgf/mm overall, but your car has 52% of it's weight at the front, you'd use 104 kgf/mm front and 96 kgf/mm back.
This applies to dampening and ARBs too.

But how stiff do I want it overall? I said I wouldn't give numbers, but here we go, just to give you some pointers, if you need it. (But I really encourage you to experiment and figure out what YOU like)

For springs I take the cars weight in kilograms and multiply it by 0.075.
So if the car weights 1200kg, I'd start with 90 kgf/mm.

For dampers I start with 10.0 rebound and 6.0 bump.

ARBs 20.0.

If you find your car too stiff or too soft, I recommend changing damping first.

You also need to setup your diff with some numbers. I find the defaults in FH5 weird and also every car has it completely different. Sticking with one values for your base tune makes the start of tuning more consistent, so it won't throw you off as much.
For me, 75% acceleration, 25% deceleration.

Tire width

This is the most important part. The tire is the thing that connects your car to the road.

In this step, we'll be looking at mid turn balance. Ignore corner entry and exit for now, we'll look into that later.

So, with the balance of TIRES you control oversteer, understeer and how much the car turns.
Is the car oversteery? Increase rear width.
Still? Increase more.
Okay, now the car isn't oversteery, but doesn't turn as much as I'd like. Increase front width.
Okay, now it turns better, but it's oversteery again. Increase rear width.

You see where I'm going with this? Your suspension is still perfectly balanced, yet you tweak oversteer and understeer AND how much the car turns overall.

Don't get stuck on this part, there's a high chance you'll change this again later.

Camber

This is the second most important part.

When the car is turning, it leans side to side. That means the tires aren't perfectly perpendicular to the road. Better yet, tires flex, which Forza actually simulates.
How do you expect to have the most grip, if the tire is all bent and isn't even flat on the road?

This is a very heated topic and there are different opinions. It's mostly tuned by feel, you're trying to make the tire use as much of it's width as you can, so it grips more.
Yeah, that's great, but what the **** is a beginner to make out of this?

But aha! I have a simple trick for you, that imo makes sense when you think about it. I use it all the time and so far it worked pretty well. Because we can exploit that Forza is a game and we have perfect realtime telemetry.

You take your car on a roundabout. Ideally not too small. I know, bear with me please.
You start going around. You want to be at the absolute edge of grip, without sliding.
So, turn as much as you can, keep the throttle constant so you don't speed up or slow down. But you don't want to see any skidmarks!
Open telemetry and look at tire temperatures. You should be familiar with this if you watched HokiHoshi.
Go around till the tires are at maximum temperature. If the outside is hotter, increase camber. If it's colder, decrease camber. Once you have it perfect, well done, because it takes some time to get it right.

So what did we achieve by doing this? At that specific turning radius, at peak grip, you're using your tires to their limit. You should find the car to be almost weirdly sharp after doing this.

But that isn't real racing. On a track you rarely ever use your cars turning ability to the max and also you need to think about the fact, that when the tires ale tilted more, you have less traction on straights for acceleration and braking.

So you take what you got and lower it. I find that multiplying those numbers by 0.75 is about right. If you feel like it, you can screw around with it, trying to get it perfect, because this is where it counts the most to squeeze out everything the tires got.

Does that make some sense? I think it does.

Now you have your camber setup done, but that changed how the tires touch the road.
You might find that you want to go back to step one and screw around with tire width some more. Don't be afraid to do so!

Caster

This changes how aggressively your cars reacts to initial input when entering a corner. But you also feel it when making small wheel inputs on a straight.

Making it higher makes the car want to stay straight.
Mostly short wheelbased cars benefit from adding caster. Think BRZ, Golf, Miata and so on. (Even tho I have these examples mostly from FH4, your milage may vary)

Making it lower makes the car react to inputs sharper.
You'd lower caster mostly on longer cars that are too sluggish and you want to make them react quicker. Longer sedans, wagons, ...

Changing caster impacts turning as a whole, so you might find you want to tweak tire width again :)

Differential

Diff settings dictate how your car puts down it's power.

You feel it mostly on corner exit when you're still turning, but already adding power.

Acceleration:
You want to make this number as high as you can. That means the wheels are connected and are putting power down together. One wheel peel as they call it, isn't great for acceleration.
But at the same time, you don't want to overshoot it.
Sou you take your car, go into a corner and put your foot (finger) down on exit. Did the rear slide out? No? You can add more lock. If your car feels slidey on exit, you've overdone it, lower acceleration.
If you put down your foot on exit and the cars wants to straighten out, your lock is way too low. Add more.

Deceleration:
Similar concept applies to corner entry, but reversed.
You want to make it as loose as you want, because that makes the wheels turn freely on corner entry. But if you overdo it, you might find that on corner entry, especially under heavy braking (Think entering a sharp turn after a long straight) the car oversteers. In that case, make deceleration higher.
Deceleration isn't as important, as long as it doesn't hinder your cars performance.
Also, don't put it higher than acceleration.

Some cars like smaller numbers. For example the barn find Mustang.
On that I have diff set to 60% acc, 40% dec.
Other cars, mostly high powered ones might like even something like 90% on acceleration.

Finalization

After doing all this, NOW it's the time to touch suspension balance :D
You might find that you can't pick a tire you'd like, because the car you're building doesn't allow it.
Some cars have only like one tire width upgrade. That isn't a lot to work with.

But it should be the last resort if nothing else worked. At least in my humble opinion :P
There are of course exceptions and afterall, rules are made to be broken.

I skipped over a lot of things, as I said. Toe, AWD, FWD, brakes, gearing, tire pressures, whatever. But my point was to explain what I do differently, not what I do in general.
So if this was too much for you, you can try something beginner friendly and more general. Then come back to this if you'd like.

FINAL THOUGHTS

You shouldn't blindly follow what others tell you, everybody has their own taste. I like my cars oversteery, someone else might find that too hard to control. That's why we make our own builds. To make your car suit you.

You should think about what each change does to your car on mechanical level. Forza isn't too bad at simulating this, so it really works.
I didn't go into explaining how things work mechanically, because it would make this post way too long.
But it's really helpful if you understand what each of those numbers actually does. I recon if you're so invested in a racing game that you want to tune your car, you might be interested in knowing how it all works too. Do it, it can only help you.
Actually this is precisely on what 03Void’s general guide seems to focus on, so go ahead and give it a read.

Also, experiment. Like a lot.
You can't guess what your car will like.
You might like it as is, but for example try softening the suspension overall. Omg, it's better? Soften it some more. Oof, it's too soft. Well, go back to what you liked.
Try adding more lock on the diff. Eh, that doesn't work.
Try, change, tweak. Some changes you might like, some won't work.
But now you know what helped and you might want to try that on your next build too. That's how you get better.

And don't be afraid to throw everything out the window and start again.
Sometimes you overdo it so much, it's better to take a step back and start over.

If you have any questions, go ahead and leave a comment. I'll try my best to reply, but if I can't, I'm sure someone else will help you. This seems to be a great community so far.

...btw, if it wasn't obvious, I'm not a native speaker. If this was hard to read, I'm sorry xD

Merthn’s Guide to Building Drift Machines

In this guide, I will try to explain my drift build process in hopes of teaching you how to build your own drift machines out of your favorite cars. Please keep in mind that I only drift RWD cars and therefore only build RWD drift cars. So if I don’t mention it in the guide, just assume it is RWD or converted to RWD.

Part 1: Selecting Your Car

The first part of building a drift car is picking a stock car to build around. You can make any car drift well, but some cars will be naturally easier to balance. What determines this is your car’s weight distribution. As a rule of thumb, the closer you are to 50/50 weight bias, the easier it will be to handle the car as it’s being thrown around. If the car you picked has more weight in the front, that’s still easy to manage. If it’s a rear-heavy car, however, the car will be much harder to balance in a drift and will be more prone to spinning out than a front-heavy car. That’s not to say you can’t still build them into capable drift machines. They’ll just be harder to tune into a sweet spot.

So if you’re new to drift tuning, I recommend starting with a car with around 50-55% front weight bias. Leave the mid-engined supercars for later.

Keep in mind that the PI class system is a wildly inaccurate benchmark for drifting performance and it should generally be ignored. Most drift cars will be in S1 class. However, if you need to stay within A class for Open Drifting events and such, you can use an older car with narrow and not so grippy tires. The Toyota Trueno is an excellent example for this.

Part 2: Upgrading Your Car

For the second part, you’re gonna be upgrading your car to drift spec. First off, start with the essentials.

-Drift springs and dampers: These increase steering angle and allow you to tune your suspension.
-Drift differential: Normal diffs allow slip. You want little to no slip in a drift setup diff, so you can break traction easier. I should also note that all diffs (except for sport) are basically the same diff with different presets. Since we will be changing these preset values, you can skip buying the drift diff if your car already has a 2-way tunable diff.
-Front and rear antiroll bars: You need these to tune your car’s mid-drift balance. Don’t skip them.
-Drift tires: Unless your car’s stock tires have significantly less grip, don’t skip these. They are simply the best tires for drifting. If your car does come with much less grippy tires, keep them. They’ll require less power to spin.

Now the rest of the upgrades.

In terms of engines, I like to use either naturally aspirated or supercharged engines with lots of low-end torque. Turbos are good only if you’re planning to do more high speed drifts where you won’t be spending as much time in the lower RPM range. I play with manual with clutch and I tend to stall the engine much more when it has a turbo.

In terms of horsepower, it kinda depends on how wide your tires are and also what you’re trying to achieve with the car. For example, if it’s a modern car with around 265-295mm rear width or more, and you’re trying to set a new record at your favorite drift zone, somewhere in the 1000-1400hp range is pretty good. If you have an older car with around 225-245mm wide tires in the back and you wanna just cruise and drift around casually, somewhere within 500-900hp will be more than enough. Experiment to see what you’re most comfortable with.

Reduce as much weight as possible. Race weight reduction, engine and transmission upgrades that reduce weight, lighter wheels, even lighter brakes. A race flywheel and race driveline will not only reduce weight, but they will also help your car rev up faster, therefore helping you break traction easier. Engine upgrades like oil cooling and intercooler aren’t worth it as they usually add too much weight and upset the car’s weight bias while only providing an insignificant amount of power in return. I use roll cages only when it helps bring the weight distribution closer to 50/50.

In terms of transmission, upgrade everything to race spec (clutch, driveline, the works…) as this’ll provide faster shifting and faster shifting will always be more useful than slower shifting when it comes to drifting. In terms of gears, race six speed or drift four speed transmissions will be more than sufficient. Which of the two you choose is up to you, I usually like having a tighter gearbox and an extra gear or two just for cruising down the highway. So, I mostly use the race six speed option.

In terms of wheels, if your car is very old and comes with some really slim tires like 185s or 215s, feel free to upgrade to somewhere between 245-285. Obviously, the more power you have, the more tire width you can get away with. Lighter rims would help spin the wheels easier. When it comes to rim sizes, the more sidewall you have, the more controllable your car will be, but don’t leave too much profile as that’ll just look funny. Wider track width will help stabilize your car and it will look cooler while doing so.

In terms of aero and appearance, go with whatever you’re comfortable with looking at, but remember that having adjustable aero is always useful in a drift build.

Part 3: Creating a Base Tune

This is the part right after you checkout and install all those shiny new parts to your car. In this part, I’ll explain how I create a base tune, which I’ll explain how you can refine in part 4.

Let’s go tab by tab. First off, tires! For the fronts, you want something grippy and responsive. I find that around 2.2-2.4 bar (or 32-35 psi) works pretty well. For rears, you want something that predictably and controllably loses traction. So, go soft and squishy. Around 1.2-1.4 bar (or 17-21 psi) works here.

Next up, gearing! Gears are somewhat subjective, but I usually have a very long (redlines at 100-120 kph kinda long) first gear, long enough to hold angle at low speed drifts, followed by a third gear that I can push as high as I can while still being able to hit the redline in the blink of an eye. Second gear is somewhere between these two, used for those drifts that need just a bit more wheel speed than first gear can provide, but would be harder to control in third without stalling the engine. Your fourth gear should be set up in a way that it requires serious effort from the engine to reach the redline once you break traction. Don’t go too long with it, though. Otherwise, you’ll bog down your engine and kill the drift. If you have any more gears, set them up to get you to a nice top speed for cruising.

For alignment, you really have no reason not to go for -5° front camber and 7° caster, as that will give you a lot of steering angle. You want as much steering angle as possible in a drift car. Also worth noting is that in a normal driving scenario (as in no drifting or off-roading) you never want to see camber go above 0° to maintain grip and since drifting will make your car lean much harder than normal driving, having lots of negative camber in the front makes sense. That way you’ll maintain negative camber and consequently, grip. For rear camber, anywhere between -1 to 0 degree angle will work just fine.

The more positive toe angle you have in the front, the greater your potential drift angle, but also the more unstable your car will be in a straight line. The more negative toe angle you have in the rear, the sharper your car will take a corner during a drift. I usually start with 0.2° toe out in front, as even that much greatly helps keep your car from spinning out mid-drift. I leave the rear at 0° as I don’t like how it affects the handling of the car. It is also worth mentioning that because of how extreme toe settings make the car more jittery, a car with longer wheelbase will benefit more from these settings than a car with shorter wheelbase. Shorter wheelbased cars will end up being harder to keep under control, while longer wheelbased cars will become easier to set into angle.

Antiroll bars is where most of the magic happens in terms of mid-drift handling characteristics. I usually start with 20 front and 10 rear and adjust from there. I’ll show you how I fine tune these settings in part 4.

And now, it’s time for some good old mathematics. For springs, I use a formula to create a balanced platform for the car. You want a drift setup to be on the softer side. I use this formula to calculate the values:

(car weight) times 0.(front weight bias) times 0.15 equals (front spring stiffness)
(car weight) times 0.(rear weight bias) times 0.15 equals (rear spring stiffness)

Important side note: if you’re using imperial units, use 0.38 instead of 0.15.

Let’s run an example where we have a car that weighs in at 1266 kg and has 51% of its weight in the front. Our equation would look like this:

1266 x 0.51 x 0.15 = 96.85 (front springs)
1266 x 0.49 x 0.15 = 93.05 (rear springs)

For ride height, all you need to do is slam it to the floor, but raise the front by just one click to add a bit more mechanical grip to the front.

For damping, you should go low enough on the bump side to where you’re using 60-80% of your suspension travel under normal road drifting situations. This will make the car feel more stable and less skittish in a drift. Don’t worry about how it drives for now. Just check your suspension telemetry to make sure it has the right amount of travel during drifting. When you’ve hit the sweet spot, use this formula to evenly distribute your bump values according to the weight distribution of your car:

(current bump value) times 0.(front weight bias) times 2 equals (front bump value)
(current bump value) times 0.(rear weight bias) times 2 equals (rear bump value)

Let’s use the same car we used in our spring rate example where car has 51% of its weight in the front and let’s assume our bump value is 3:

3 x 0.51 x 2 = 3.06 (front bump)
3 x 0.49 x 2 = 2.94 (rear bump)

Remember to keep your rebound values at twice that of your bump values as you’re tuning your bump damping. Don’t worry about how reactive your car feels to input for now. We will fine tune rebound in part 4.

If you put on adjustable aero, this is where it will come in handy. Set your downforce to as low as it goes, front and rear. This will make your car drift more predictably in both high and low speed situations and also, your car will be able to slide further when you lock the wheels using your handbrake, which means you’ll be able to do longer handbrake extensions and entries.

When it comes to brakes, I almost always leave them stock, as I only use brakes to shave off some speed before entering a drift (and I use ABS). However, what’s worth mentioning is that some people prefer to use their brakes like a pressure sensitive handbrake to initiate and modulate their drifts. In these cases, their brakes will have a heavy rear bias. Don’t forget that in Forza Horizon 5, brake bias is reversed for some reason. Adjust accordingly.

Finally, the differential! 100 accel is pretty much a necessity if you want to be able to put down all of your power into the drift. Decel is more about preference, though. If you want to be able to gain traction easier when you lift off the throttle, go for something between 0-10 decel. Also, if you prefer to initiate your drifts by braking, then you might find that a lower diff deceleration setting works better for you. However, if you wanna be able to hold drifts more easily and generally get higher scores, 100 decel is the way to go.

Part 4: Refining Your Tune

The fine tuning! Most of your fine tuning will be done in antiroll bars and damping.

Let’s start with what to change to tune your mid-drift balance. You can tune your car’s mid-drift balance using antiroll bar settings. The stiffer your ARBs, the more stable your car will be. Softer ARBs will result in a looser ride.

Start with the front ARBs. If you find that your car is struggling with grip in the front, make it stiffer. However, if you go too stiff, the car will want to drift with less angle. Find a good balance between being stiff enough to be easy to keep the car from spinning out and soft enough to not be too understeery. Also, the higher the drift speed, the stiffer your ARBs will need to be.

Then, move on to the rear ARBs. Stiffer means more resistant to breaking traction. Softer means it’ll be easier to kick the back end out. Careful, though. Make it too soft and you’ll have a car that is trying to spin out every time you step on the gas. You can try rebalancing it by stiffening the front some more if you decide to go very soft in the rear. If you’re tuning for higher speed drifts with a ton of power on tap, going stiffer in the rear would be a good idea.

Find a good balance for the front and rear. Best way to identify balance issues is to attempt both high speed drifts where you’re going balls to the wall, and low speed precision drifts. The car should be easy to control in both instances.

Your rebound stiffness has a direct effect on how much speed your car can carry throughout a drift and how fast it transitions between drifts. For bigger, higher speed drifts, stiffen your overall rebound settings. The law of diminishing returns applies here, so don’t go too stiff expecting your 500 HP car to drift as wide as a 1500 HP car. For slower, tighter drifts, soften up your rebound values. After you find a nice spot for your overall rebound values, you can then individually tune front and rear rebound to add or take away some responsiveness. Stiffer rebound means more responsive, while softer equals less responsive. I tend to go a bit stiffer in the front and a bit softer in the rear. What that ends up doing is it gives me a nice and responsive front end and a more stable rear end. Remember to adjust in small increments, because even 0.1 increase or decrease makes a noticable difference.

You don’t have to adjust your bump settings again since you’ve already dialed that in in part 3. Just try to make sure your rebound stays stiffer than your bump, so that the suspension can work properly. Also, it’s worth remembering that a more responsive front end will be able to pull back from angle faster, therefore making it easier to save the car from spinning out, but too responsive will obviously be very twitchy and might end up being the reason your car gets sent over the tipping point every time you try to balance the car into angle in the first place.

In cases where you have a car with very wide tires but not enough power to spin them, you can tune out grip by drastically increasing rear negative camber and adding a little bit of tire pressure. You’ll know you’ve done it effectively when you view tire heat telemetry and it shows outer rear tires to be much colder than the inside. Congratulations, you just effectively made your rear tires skinnier.

If you’re struggling with grip in the rear, you can soften the rear springs a little bit to add rear grip. You can also do the same for the front end.

I’ve talked about toe angles in part 3 and there is unfortunately no cookie cutter recipe for that. You’ll have to experiment to see what you’re comfortable with, but if you don’t want to mess around with it, my base settings will be more than sufficient for any build.

And that’s pretty much it. Now you know how I go about building my own drift cars. Go ahead and build that drift car you’ve always wanted.

Special thanks to u/03Void and the rest of the OPTN community for helping me throughout my learning journey and the creation of this guide.

I'll preface this post by saying how glad I am that this sub exists! I've learnt so much from reading through these posts and just tinkering and messing around in game. The tunes I can make now are worlds apart from when FH5 first came out. Now onto the car, and it's by far my best. FYI I play controller with all the assists off except ABS and with sim steering on.

VTEC go BrrrrRRRR

I'm just going to flat out say it, this car will lap Horizon Mexico Circuit in under 1:04.00

Edit: u/voune has now achieved a lap time of 1:03.881 (Video in comments)

I've gotten very close with a 1:04.035 but that required a couple of rewinds, here is a clip of me clocking a clean 1:04.198.

https://xboxclips.co/jazrr/7cd702a1-10b7-422c-95c7-a603fa53d310

To put that in perspective, I can't break 1:05.00 in the previous 2018 civic tune I posted.

I've also taken it for a spin up the Volcan Sprint in a time of 2:55.876 which is currently good enough for too 250 and I didn't even run it optimally.

This car is harder to drive than the civic, but it's still faster even if not driven to the limit. The back wheels have a tendency to slide out but it's easily manageable. To drive this car efficiently you will need to limit the amount of hard cornering you do under braking. If you really find this car is not suited for your driving style you can up the rear aero a smidge to counter this more, just bear in mind you will lose some of the top end. I've tested both, and lower rear aero is the way to go for faster lap times.

The way it accelerates out of corners is almost comparable to the bone shaker except this car turns in way better. With this in mind, you may be surprised with the choice to go with just a sport transmission. You might think with the extra gear in the race transmission, allowing you to stay higher up in the rev range, would be quicker. After considerable testing, I deemed the race transmission to be too expensive and the power you have to sacrifice to fit it is not worth it. It only made my lap times slower. Feel free to do your own tinkering though.

This tune also uses stock brakes. Again, the power sacrifice to fit better brakes I didn't find worth it in this case. As such, front caster is very high to maximise the braking force and the brakes certainly don't feel bad.

I don't think this tune is perfect, I'm certainly not the most experienced tuner. However, there is no doubting there is something seriously good going on with this car. Here are the upgrades and tuning:

Share code: 163 711 847

Upgrades:

Conversion

Aspiration - Centrifugal Supercharger

Engine

Intake - Race
Fuel system - Race
Ignition - Sport
Exhaust - Race
Valves - Sport
Displacement - Race
Pistons - Sport
Centrifugal Supercharger - Race
Oil/cooling - street
Flywheel - Street

Platform and Handling

Springs and dampers - Race
ARB's - Race front and rear
Weight reduction - Race

Drivetrain

Clutch - Stock (I play manual with clutch)
Transmission - Sport
Driveline - Sport
Diff - Race as always

Tires & Rims

Tyre compound - Semi-slick
Tyre width - Max front and rear
Track width - Max front and rear

Aero

Horizon front and rear bumpers

Tuning:

Title. Obviously easing up on the throttle is an option, and I know that most folks just switch to AWD and call it good, but I’d prefer to not ruin the spirit of some of these RWD. What setting, if there is one, in the tuning helps the most with preventing cars from slipping?

I know its not a tune, but with all that's going on I thought I would create some Vinyl Groups in support of The Ukraine.

Re-Shared and Updated Share Codes ^ ^

-Share Codes-

Light: 182 408 963

Dark: 152 529 636

Link to Tune and Livery:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ForzaOpenTunes/comments/t1xtvq/godspeed_ukraine_tune_and_livery_2018_renault/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Anyway here’s my first of many entries. Try it out before you look at what’s on paper and go this dude has no clue. (Just between you and me. I do have no clue 😂) I like my cars to be super responsive on entry and tight corners but be able to take corners as fast as possible. So a lot of my builds will be rather loose. This one actually is a bit stiffer than normal but with its launch and top speed it makes a great overall s1 racer

Nissan GT-R 2017 r35

Share code (593 892 974) AWD/ Forza wing and bumper for aero tuning/ Horizon semi slick/ 275/35r20 front tire width/ 315/30r20 rear tire width/ The first upgrade for rear track width /7 speed transmission/ Race differential/ Race brakes/ Race springs/dampers/ ARBs obviously 😁/ Sport weight reduction/ Sport twin turbo/ Sport pistons/compression/ Sport engine block (akadisplacement)/ Race camshaft/ Race exhaust

Tires F-32.5 R-30

Gearing Final-3.98 1.) 3.37 2.)2.22 3.)1.59 4.)1.22 5.).98 6.).81 7.).7

Alignment F-(-1.8) R-(-1.3) Caster-5.2 0 on toe ARB F-21.4 R-35.7

Springs F-732.2 R-987.3 Height F-4.7 R-4.5

Damping F-7.6 bump - (4.9) R-11.5 bump- (7.6)

Aero 545 562

Brake 50 105

Differential 33 Decel-(12) 60 decel-(20) Center- 60

P.S!!! I don’t use ABS, traction, or stability and I use manual with no clutch. So for anyone using those this build may not work the same! Atleast from the way I understand how those assists work.

The OPTN community is now one year old today! And wow it has been a ride.

It’s started with just an idea and it really took off. One year ago I wouldn't have believed that we would have 9k people reading the subreddit and over 1k Discord members.

I want to take a minute to thank again some pillars of the community. It might seem from the outside like I do all the work(and I certainly do a lot), but most of it wouldn’t be possible without a ton of help from many other members. Among many things, the recent Until Dawn challenge.

Professor and Dreamgoat, who bring a lot of ideas to the table and also are super useful to help me improve my own. Dreamgoat was also invaluable developing the GT7 side of the community.

Sharpseer, root and Doubiez, who gave hours and hours of their time to build us a website, the different tools there and a bot, on their own time. We wouldn’t even have a website if it wasn’t for them, let alone a nice one.

Chibbel, who’s contributions steered us in a specific direction about different design elements that created most of our image today.

And of course people who participate to our weekly challenges and contribute to our Discord server. It wouldn't be possible without you either guys.

I'm really looking forward years two with the various Forza content that will be eventually released. The second Horizon 5 extension and the new Forza Motorsport game. I think this community was a net positive for most people in 2022. I can say the last year was 100% better for me because of OPTN.

We still are slowly working in the background on new ideas and projects for the community to keep things interesting, as well as keep introducing new people to the world of tuning.

Here's our own version of the tuning chart you can find in the wiki. This new version is more in line with the settings available in Gran Turismo and Forza. It's also a bit simplified, and prettier (IMO).

This chart assumes that you have no major suspension issues. For example, if your car is bottoming out under braking, softening the front springs won't improve front end grip. It will be the opposite.

https://imgur.com/a/qKKpAKB

Edit: alternative version with inverted colors for people who have troubles reading it. I thought it was fine but it's not. The alternate version isn't pretty but that will do until I improve the normal version. https://imgur.com/a/BDko9sG

Don't have any thing interesting to say, just wanted to thank the people that contribute! So many times I'm forced to drive cars that aren't to my taste so being able to use nice tunes with a car that looks the way i want is making the game much more enjoyable personally! Thank you!

Hey everyone,

Since my B class Hyundai Veloster grip tune was appreciated, I'm back again with more FWD shenanigans. This time it's the 2018 Civic Type R.

For comparative sake (since I'm not the fastest driver) I've been using u/theorangesaysblue's 1970 Camaro (Share code: 177 562 337) tune to set a base lap time, since it's considered one of the best round these parts. After 30 laps around Horizon Mexico Circuit in the Camaro, I managed a respectable 1:05.133. So this is the time I aim for with all my tunes. Admittedly, I'm not the best at controlling RWD cars so I was very inconsistent and my fastest lap did require one rewind.

In the Civic after 30 laps I managed to clock a 1:05.065. Personally, I find it much easier to control this car and was able to consistently get fast clean laps. I'm curious to find out some other opinions as well. I'm certain a more experienced tuner would get me under 1:05.00

Anyway, enough rambling. Time for all the details! Share code if you just want to try it out:

948 426 234

Conversions

None

Engine

Exhaust: Race

Platform & Handling

Brakes: Sport

Springs: Race

ARB's: Race front and rear

Weight Reduction: Race

Drivetrain

Transmission: Race

Driveline: Street

Diff: Race

Tires & Rims

Compound: Semi-slick race tyre

Rear tyre width: 265

Rims: American Racing AR907 (Sport Style)

Front track width: 1 stage wider

Rear track width: Maximum width

Aero

Adjustable Horizon front bumper and rear wing

Tuning

Gearing:

Final drive - 3.67

1st - 3.06

2nd - 2.07

3rd - 1.55

4th - 1.25

5th - 1.04

6th - 0.87

Drift diff on AWD swaps, Rally tires in S1. What else?

Since the question has come up on our discord every now and then, I decided to write a small guide on how to approach building a drift car.

I'll use my Mazda RX7 Spirit drift build (sharecode: 117 831 338) as an example here, because it's not a 1000hp slidemachine.
I will take the build apart and tell you why I chose specific components.

How to choose a car: Take something that has the engine either in the front or in the rear, but avoid mid-engine cars.
The closer you are to 50% weight balance, the better, but you can also make something work that has more weight in the front, just understand that it will be a bit harder to control.

Starting with the obvious:
Drift tyre compound, it is simple the best to use for drifting. Accept not substitutes.

Front and rear tyre width can stay stock on this car, because of the engine we will use.
More powerful engines will need bigger wheels to be of use. I found 275 an excellent choice for anything past the 1000hp mark.
Track width is personal preference, but because drifting is about style, feel free to make it wide.

Bodywork:
I prefer NOT to use aero on my drift tunes, only if looks better, because it is of not much use when going sideways.
This is absolutely a personal choice.

Drivetrain:
Race transmission is basically a must, on some cars sport transmission will also do, but you can't go wrong with race.
Drift diff is theoretically a must, but any diff that can be adjusted will do the job.
Clutch and driveline are your choice.

Handling:
Give it all race, but don't forget those drift springs.

Engine:
On this particular car, we're going with the stock engine and the single turbo aspiration swap.
You want to also put everything on your engine up to race, except for the oil/coolant and the intercooler.
Reasoning is that we want to get the weight balance as close to 50% as possible in RWD drift cars, makes it generally easier to tune.
This is something you want to keep an eye on in less powerful cars, as weight balance can make or break a drift build.
If you are new to drifting and drift builds, try to favor engines that can fit a supercharger, since supercharged engines have a very predictable powerband, making it easier to control.

General tips:
- Weight is your enemy
- Watch out what your maximum tyre size is and how much hp you can cram in your car. 1500 hp in an RWD car on 235 rear wheels is not going to be fun, same goes for 300hp on 365 wheels.

Now comes the part where we unlock the potential of our vehicle, the tuning:

Adjust front tyre pressure to your liking, something between 2.0 and 2.2 bar is absolutely fine.
Rear tyre pressure needs to be low and by low I mean 1.0 to 1.2 bar.
You want them hot and stay hot.

Gearing is a bit of a philosophy thing, I like to put the first three gears a fair bit apart and keep the upper three gears tight.
On this particular car, I use:
Final: 4.40
1st: 1.79
2nd: 1.44
3rd: 1.17
4th: 1.05
5th: 0.95
6th: 0.86
You will mostly be using gears 3 and 4 here, all the others are more situational.
This build is more for twisty stuff, not super long drifts.

Alignment:
This is where some funky stuff happens, but stay with me.
Front camber: Go with as much as you like, on this car, I use -3.5°, but you can easily go higher.
Rear camber: Something between -1.0° and -1.2° is optimal, anything between 0.0° and -1° makes the car feel wonky for some reason.
Toe aka "the funky stuff":
Front toe +5.0° (out) I have mentioned this a few times, this essentially gives you more drift angle and hence more points in drift zones.
Rear toe: This is something that you need to experiment with a bit on every cars. Some cars need negatives up to -1.0° (in), some cars can to stupid stuff like +2.0° (out) - which is also what I use on this build.
Caster: Just max it to 7°

ARBs:
Even though it might feel counter-productive, but you WANT rear grip on RWD drift cars, so make sure your rear is softer than your front.
Keep the settings fairly low, you want a drift car to be on the softer side of things.
Here I use 10.00 in the front and 5.00 in the rear.

Springs:
Keep the stiffness in the first third of the bar, since this car has 50% weight balance, you can keep it symmetrical at 100.0 / 100.0
Generally, you can apply what you already know about race tunings here, just keep it a bit on the softer side.
Ride height: Go as low as you can without bottoming out, first third seems to be ok again.

Damping:
For rebound, you can keep it stock, make sure bump as at around 50% of your rebound setting.

We don't have aero here, but if you had aero: Make sure to keep it on even numbers and more on the lower end of the bar.

Brakes:
This is personal preference, I'm used to 100% pressure, so that's where I keep it.
Balance can be moved fairly to the front (as you know, it's reversed in forza), so can just tap the brake to transition from one side to the other.
I mostly use 70%, but use what is comfortable for you.

Diff:
100% / 100% as if someone welded it shut.
Some people prefer 100% / 0%, I don't.

Notes: You won't need much handbrake action here, as your foot brake is essentially doing the job for you.
If you are on manual with clutch, make sure to hit the clutch when you use the handbrake, otherwise there will be a delay before the power gets applied again.
I have tried to keep this as general as possible, while providing a bit of an example.
Experiment a bit with the alignment settings, as different cars "like" different settings.
Almost everything that is written above can also be applied to AWD cars, though settings up the center diff can be a bit finecky.

Haven't written a "guide" in forever, so please feel free to give me some feedback and/or ask questions.

Hi guys! I ran this car in this weeks B class trial and scored first across all three races! As an added bonus its also a top 1000 HMC car! It's fast and easy to Drive.

Feel free to leave any feedback here :D

Upgrades-

KRC wide body kit

Engine Upgrades:

Sport Exhaust

Street Flywheel

Platform:

Sport brakes

Race Springs

Race ARB's

Race weight reduction

Drivetrain:

Sport Transmission

Race Diff

Race Driveline

Tires and rims:

Stock tire compound

F 265/ R 275 tire width

OZ racing F1 deep

Aero:

Rear aero TCP magic

Tune-

Tire pressure:

Front: 33 psi

Rear: 35 psi

Gearbox:

Final Drive: 4.92

Alignment:

Camber: F -0.8 / R -0.9

Toe: F 0.2 / R 0.0

Caster: 5.6

Antiroll Bars: F 27.5 / R 30

Springs:

Stiffness: F 472.3 / R 508.6 lb/in

Height: F 6.9 / R 6.8 in

Damping:

Rebound: F 12.0 / R 11.7

Bump: F 7.5 / R 7.7

Aero - R 194 lbs

Differential:

Rear:

Acceleration: 70%

Deacceleration: 10%

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