Tuning Setup Help Please

Can someone explain to me how to use the tuning setup I am mostly car iliterate when it comes to that so can and the text comes out blurry because its so damn small so I can read which thing does what can someone explain it to me so I can get my cars to thier full potential.

Pretty much any car I mainly wanna toon my Dodge Challenger '09, my Lancer, and my Audi 8.5

Ah okay, well Im pretty much curious on which setting adjust for what like what you said which settings would help with straight up speed, which settings help with turning and handling. And which way I need to adjust them like for breaking do I turn it on heavy or light for or pressure on the front or back, stuff like that. (And what you gave does help alittle thank you.)

Okay, cool. Cool. These are definatly helping.

Ok, so the next section...

ALIGNMENT:

This section basically just deals with the angles that your tyres are working at. First of all, we'll deal with the "camber".

When your car goes round a corner, weight shifts to the side of the car facing away from the apex. Because of this weight shift, the car 'leans' on the outside tyres more and causes those tyres to run more on just one edge of the tyre. To maximise cornering grip, ideally we want the outside tyres to be using their full width to grip the road (i.e. a full contact patch) rather than just the edge of the tyres. This is where camber comes in. If you put negative camber on your wheels then the tyres are set up to have a full contact patch when you are going around corners.

So that's the theory for camber, but it's actually very difficult to determine the best values to use. Your car will shift its weight differently depending on the kind of corner you are going round (e.g. it will be different going round a hairpin to going round a fast corner). The only way to work out the best values of camber to use is to do some practice laps with your telemetry up. One of the telemetry pages tells you the camber angle of each individual tyre. What you need to do is to drive around the course at racing speed whilst reading the camber values of the outside tyres as you go round each corner (i.e. when going round a right-hand corner, you need to be checking the camber values of the left-hand tyres). It's difficult to drive fast whilst checking telemetry, but it's possible. You want your outside camber angle to be around 0 degrees as you go round corners (since this means the tyre is using it's full width to grip the road). The number is constantly changing and is different on different kinds of corner, so really it's all down to judgement. Most top drivers have different camber setups for all different tracks, but I'm too lazy to do that and stick with one setup for all courses, since the changes will only be slight from one course to another. There really is no general number I can give for camber, since it changes massively depending on the kind of car you are using. I guess a good place to start is to put Front camber to -0.3 and rear camber to -0.8.

Toe angle is much more simple. If you find your car struggles to turn into corners at the start of a corner, then you need to give your car more "toe out", which will make it more responsive. You don't want to change it by large amounts (somewhere between 0 and 0.5 degrees) because using too much "toe out" will cause your car to become unstable and twitchy. If you find that your car is unstable (usually American Muscle cars), then you may want to give your car more "toe in", which will make the steering less responsive but will make the car more stable. Some examples for toe angle could be:

A FWD Ford Focus, which understeers going into corners, I would probably start off by giving it 0.2 degrees at the front and 0.1 at the rear.

A RWD Chevvy Camaro, which is all over the place and hard to drive, I would try something like -0.2 at the front and -0.3 at the rear.

Finally, "Caster angle" basically determines how flat your tyres run on straights and helps the car to overcome the negative camber you have put on it to help it round corners. Usually, you want higher caster angles in RWD cars than in FWD cars, but there is no general number I can give for a starting point. Just try changing it to see what difference it makes to the feel of the car.

I'm sure I've bored you to tears now, but if you're finding this useful then let me know and I'll do another chapter tomorrow! Lol

thanks alot for all the tips guys....you have no idea how much this is gonna help me out

GEARING:

This is where you can make some big changes to improve your cars' performance, especially in drag racing. I'm not a top-notch drag racer, so the advice I give here will be more relevant for track racing, although the main principles are exactly the same. Remember that you have to have a racing transmission upgrade on your car in order to change the gear ratios (or at least a sports transmission to change the final drive ratio).

To start with, I want to dispel the myth the altering gear ratios is difficult. It really isn't that hard. If you break it down into steps then you can't go wrong. First of all I'll go into a little more detail about what the gearing options mean.

On your setup screen you have "Final Drive" and then the gears in your transmission numbered from "1st" up to "6th" gear. Gears 1st to 6th are literally gears in the gearbox of your car. The final drive ratio is actually separate from the gearbox and is part of the differential. All this means is that by changing the final drive ratio, you lengthen/shorten ALL of your gear changes at the same time.

The graph on this screen is very, very useful. You should notice that when you reduce the gear ratio, it increase the speed at which you can go in that gear (you should see the line on the graph move). We'll use this graph more later...

The basic priciples are:

1) You want your car to be accelerating as quickly as possible in 1st gear (quick off the start line). Dependant on your car's drive type (FWD/RWD/AWD) the technique will vary slightly. The best tip I can give here is that you don't want tons of wheelspin, since that is wasting acceleration energy. But conversley, you don't want to have no wheelspin at all, because this indicates that your gear is too "long" and your engine isn't operating in its high-power range. AWD cars have more traction from a standing start than FWD and RWD cars, so you should be able to get very good acceleration without too much wheelspin. Your 1st gear ratio will also differ depending on whether you use traction control or not.

2) You need to setup your "top" gear so that your car maxes-out on the rev counter (starting to red-line) at the fastest point on the circuit (e.g. the end of the drag strip on a drag race). I said "top" gear instead of 6th gear because you may not always want to use all 6 gears.

3) You don't have to use all 6 gears available to you. Sometimes it is quicker to use all 6 gears, sometimes it isn't. Changing gears costs time, because your engine will not be driving you forward for that split second as you shift up. So in one way changing gears is bad. But then we wouldn't want to just use 1 gear now, would we? We'd be slow to accelerate around most of the track. So a compromise is needed. Usually you will want to use all 6 gears, but it is not uncommon to use just 5 or even 4. I would only recommend using fewer gears if you have an engine with a good amount of torque.

4) So you've chosen the ratio for your top gear and for 1st gear. Now what about all the ones in between? This is where the graph comes in. For now, look at the graph and change gear ratios for 2nd through 5th gears so that the lines on the graph are fairly evenly spaced out between 1st gear and 6th/top gear. You want the gaps between the graph lines to be a bit bigger between the lower gears than they are for the higher gears. This will give your car even acceleration in all gears between 1st and top gear.


Those are the main principles. Getting your gears right simply takes a bit of trial and error when you test drive your car:

1) Doing some stop-starts to work out the best ratio for 1st gear.

2) Do some quick laps round the circuit to find where the fastest point is and then tune your top gear to max out at that point.

3) You may find that the work you did in step (4) above might have left you with some slightly awkward gear changes. For example, needing to shift up from 3rd to 4th gear just a couple of seconds before you enter a braking zone. In a case like this, it may be better to tweak your 3rd gear to be a bit "longer" so that you don't have to shift up in such a wasteful way. Once you've got this right, try to "space out" the lines on the graph again so that your 4th gear isn't excessively short.

4) Once you have done the work on 1st to 6th gear, remember that if you change you final drive ratio, it will alter all the work you have already done.



I hope that little lot helps! There was a lot there, so if any of it was ambiguous then let me know and I'll sort it

quote Toninho

I just don't see myself sitting test-lapping my Rabbit to shave off a 10th of a second here or there...

It definitely does take time to tune a car properly, there's no beating around the bush. But you're not talking 10th's of a second. For instance, on Forza 2, I managed to improve my D-class Golf lap time from 1:02.3xx down to 1:00.7xx, which is getting on for a 2 second or so improvement. It took a lot of patience, but then I used the car loads and it won me a lot of races. I'd say it's only worth spending a lot of time tuning cars that you KNOW you will spend a lot of time driving. For the rest, I usually just make sure that it's stable to drive.

Anyway, I'll quickly cover another section...


ANTI-ROLL BARS / SWAY BARS:

Anti-Roll Bars (ARBs) are used for 2 reasons. The first reason is that it improves chassis stiffness and the second is that they can be used to alter the handling characteristics of your car. The latter is massively useful if you have a car which isn't doing what you want it to do.

Changing the stiffness settings of your ARBs will alter the amount of understeer and oversteer that your vehicle has. If you have a RWD car which is oversteering too much then you can change your ARB settings to fix this. The same goes for a FWD drive car that understeers too much.

Increasing the stiffness of your REAR ARBs will increase the amount of oversteer that your car experiences (very useful for understeering FWD cars). Decreasing your REAR ARB stiffness will reduce oversteer (very useful for crazy RWD cars).

Increasing the stiffness of your FRONT ARBs will increase understeer. Decreasing the stiffness of your FRONT ARBs will decrease understeer.

Remember that your ARBs work through the suspension. If you make your ARBs stiffer, then you are also affecting how the suspension is working. If you make your ARBs too 'loose', then you may find that one of your wheels leaves the ground around corners because the car rolls too much. If you have your ARBs set really stiff then this can make your car "bounce" off curbs rather than running smoothly over them. Trial and error is your friend again here!