How to Tune in Forza Horizon 5 | Basics of Tuning Guide

hey everyone welcome to the forza horizon 5 tuning guide this video covers a walkthrough of the tuning system as a whole as well as explaining how to diagnose any shortcomings of your build and how to solve them with the tuning system many players new to horizon will upgrade their cars to be lightweight with tons of power but then find them hard to drive because they lack a proper tune this video should help for those players and anyone just curious to learn more and start tuning in horizon 5 which is an extremely important element to improving the speed and handling of any car in horizon learning to tune yourself instead of downloading pre-made tunes that can't be tweaked will allow you to create builds much better suited to your own driving style this will be a fairly thorough guide but to keep it short and easily digestible i won't be diving too deep into specifics and finer details think of this as an intro course if you're familiar with my past guides stay tuned although many of the basic principles are the same the horizon 5 tuning process is different this video is going to be broken into two major parts for the first half i'll walk through each window of the tuning menu covering what the corresponding part does what the setting means and guidelines and value ranges for different types of cars and while doing this we'll set up a base tune for an r35 in s1 class although each car is unique there are still general improvements that almost always improve the handling right away for any car this is what a base tune is just covering the tuning basics using general guidelines and quickly getting your car into a more drivable state base tunes are just the beginning though in the second part of this video we'll actually take a look at some cars on the road and talk about how to find problems fix them and fine tune our build finally we'll take a look at just how much tuning can improve your car by comparing the default tune versus a fully tuned car around a test track now first things first you may notice while browsing the tuning window that certain settings are locked this is due to you not having installed the corresponding upgrade look for the yellow text boxes in the upgrades window suspension upgrades will unlock suspension tuning aerodynamics upgrades will unlock aero tuning and so on in this r35 build i've left front aero tuning locked by not installing an adjustable front splitter more on that later there's also two terms you should know before tuning and i'll only cover them quickly now but we'll cover them a bit more later these are oversteer and understeer understeer means simply that the car isn't turning as much as you want it to oversteer is essentially the opposite the car turns more than you want it to often leading to the rear end breaking loose and you spinning out or going into a drift the trick with really most of tuning is to reduce excessive understeer or oversteer and find the balance and your personal preference all right now back in the tuning menu you can see we open with tire pressure and in fact we're going to tune this setting last i typically find it much easier to tune by starting at the rightmost window differential tuning and then working my way left so let's begin with differentials or diffs for short differentials control how much power goes to either the left or right wheel a rear wheel drive car will only have a rear diff a front-wheel drive car will only have a front diff and an all-wheel drive car will have a rear front and center diff here's a quick example of how differentials work a completely open diff one that's at zero percent lock will send all the engine's power to the path of least resistance so let's say you have your rear wheel drive car parked with one wheel in the air and the other on the road a differential at zero percent lock will send all the cars power to that wheel in the air and you won't get anywhere as you increase the differential lock more power will be sent to the wheel on the ground and as you can see you'll start moving this is a pretty basic visual example of what differentials do so obviously some lock is good but locking the differential entirely would defeat the purpose of having one at all and mean both your left and right wheels are always moving at the exact same rate they're locked together and that's bad because your inside tire on a corner needs to turn slower than your outside tire otherwise you'll break traction side note this is why welded diffs are so popular in drifting welding the diff causes 100 lock and makes it really easy to break the tires loose but we don't want that in racing so let's start with rear differential acceleration tuning which controls how your rear diff locks up while on the throttle and plays a huge role in the oversteer understeer balance with the rear diff a higher acceleration setting is almost always preferred and will promote more oversteer on any build until you get too high that one of the wheels can't spin at the right speed for a given corner and it starts to break traction as a general rule set this between 50 and 90 percent higher powered cars will generally want a value higher in this range since this r35 is at the top of s1 class i'm going to start with a value of 80 here now let's talk front differential acceleration setting and things are effectively opposite here you'll want this setting somewhere between 10 and 50 percent lower values will often provide more oversteer but on high power builds and high grip builds or for rally pushing the setting higher in the range can be helpful to put that power down this is an especially important setting for front wheel drive cars i'm gonna leave this r35 at 15 for now let's talk about deceleration settings for front and rear this affects how locked your diff is well not on the throttle and often doesn't play as large of a role in your car's tuning but it can affect corner entry turn-in among some other things you generally don't want this set higher than your acceleration setting but you can go as low as zero percent which is where i usually start feel free to play around with this setting a lot as it comes down more to personal preference a lower setting will generally help the car feel more responsive but less stable higher settings will feel much more stable while entering corners now let's talk center differential this one works a bit differently by controlling how much power goes to either the front or back wheels of the car essentially this is how you can make the car feel more rear-wheel drive or more front-wheel drive more power to the rear will promote oversteer more power to the front gives understeer you'll want this set between 50 and 80 percent in most cases with rally builds generally staying closer to 50 and most track builds pushing more power to the rear 70 is a great starting value so i'll leave this here this is a great setting to adjust when you have an all-wheel drive build and you're trying to dial in the over understeer balance now keep in mind with diff tuning that of course in rear wheel drive you only have the rear diff to work with and front wheel only has a front diff and with that let's move on to our next window break tuning there's not too much to mess with here but tuning break balance and pressure can be a great way to shave a bit of time off your laps break balance adjusts how much of your braking force goes to either the front or rear brakes fairly simple but there's one key issue break balance is reversed in horizon for example sliding this towards front will give you more braking power in the rear this has been the case for the past few games so i doubt it'll get changed in horizon 5 but just in case it does i'll leave a note in the description or something adjusting break balance can help with breaking stability as well more braking in the front means more stability more braking in the rear means more oversteer while braking now for brake pressure this simply adjusts how much total braking force you have and controls how easily your brakes will lock up or engage abs if you have it enabled since brake tuning is of relatively lower importance and varies heavily on the car driver and whether or not you use abs i generally recommend leaving these settings stock for a base tune and just adjusting as needed or if you really want to maximize your build let's move on to aero tuning this is adjusted by things like front splitters and rear wings and simply speaking use air resistance to push the car down onto the road so the more air resistance and speed the more downward pushing meaning that many lower class cars that aren't reaching high speeds won't necessarily need access to this it's fairly unimportant on cars below about b-class but can be extremely important on higher class vehicles front downforce tuning adjusts how much downforce is applied to the front of the car and of course rear downforce tuning affects downforce on the rear more downforce overall which means moving the slider towards cornering will improve your grip at high speeds and can vastly improve your cornering ability at the expense of high speed acceleration and top speed front downforce specifically will promote more oversteer and make the car feel more responsive and snappy rear downforce can and will improve cornering grip but too much can promote understeer and make the car feel less responsive especially if you have high rear downforce paired with a low front downforce your downforce settings will vary heavily based on the rest of the build and what you're building the car for i leave this alone until i get on the track for testing but typically end up increasing my downforce all around you can see i've left my front aero tuning locked on my r35 build this is likely to promote understeer and i'm leaving it this way to show that problems like this can be solved just through tuning so we'll get back to this at the end of the video as a general guide though the faster you're going the more you'll feel the effects of downforce if you want better handling and cornering apply more downforce if you want more acceleration and top speed reduce downforce now it's time to dive into the suspension tuning windows these are damping springs anti-roll bars and alignment historically i've always used a formula to set a base value for many of these settings in these four windows but horizon 5's suspension physics are vastly improved and as such the formula is no longer quite so helpful so starting with rebound and bump stiffness these settings adjust how your suspension responds to imperfect road conditions bumps and weight shifts bump damping adjusts how the spring compresses and rebound damping adjusts how the spring extends i like to start with the stock rebound stiffness on my base tune but the default bump stiffness is often a bit too stiff bump stiffness as a general rule should always be between 50 and 75 of your rebound stiffness and if you have race suspension installed bump stiffness usually defaults to right in the middle 63 if you need to calculate these values to make sure you're within your range take your rebound stiffness multiply it by 0.5 for 50 or 0.75 for 75 percent and then that number would be your bump stiffness front rebound applies to front bump rear rebound applies to rear bump you can leave your bump settings as is but like i said i find them a bit too stiff and will usually bump them down a notch or two for starters you typically want bump towards the low end only raising it if you notice the car bouncing or feeling a bit unstable it's also just a lot easier to feel improvements in bump stiffness by starting low and then working your way up if needed and the general concept with damping adjustments as a whole is to increase stiffness on the end of the car that is not losing grip or soften the end that is losing grip for example if your rear end keeps sliding out increase front rebound and bump stiffness or reduce rear rebound and bump there are also some great ways to adjust corner entry exit and transitioning with these settings but we'll get to that in the second half of the video damping settings are one of those things that kind of affect every aspect of your car's handling in some way let's move over to springs this is where you can adjust your overall spring stiffness as well as ride height spring stiffness is another great place to adjust that over understeer balance and overall a heavier and or lower car should use stiffer springs race suspension will often set up default values that are a bit too stiff for my taste and understeer too much here's the general guideline lowering front spring stiffness increases oversteer softer suspension as a whole will feel less responsive but typically more grippy stiff suspension will help the car feel snappy but make it more prone to sudden loss of grip all-wheel and front-wheel drive cars are the most prone to understeer so on those vehicles i'll drop the front stiffness a bit on my base tunes but on real wheel drive i just adjust as needed now for ride height generally we want to lower things a bit which lowers your center of gravity and improves handling and aerodynamics this may cause you to bottom out but we'll cover that in section 2. for now let's drop ride height to two notches above the minimum and move on to anti-roll bars also known as sway bars anti-sway bars or arbs anti-roll bars tie the left and right sides of your suspension together and play a big role in mid corner over or understeer a softer front roll bar will give the car a more darty feeling in the front as it's allowing the body to roll onto the outside front tire similarly increasing rear stiffness will promote oversteer and often i find that these settings should be adjusted quite a bit on front and all-wheel drive cars shoot for halfway between the stock setting and minimum on front arbs and halfway between the stock setting and maximum on rear arbs for rear wheel drive cars leave this as is for your base tune you'll notice for arbs spring rates and damping that the sliders are generally adjusted to account for the car's weight distribution which you can see here in the upgrades menu when you hit y front 50 would mean that there's exactly 50 50 weight distribution between the front and rear tires front followed by a percentage higher than 50 percent means there's more weight over the front tires and if there's more weight over the rear tires you'll see a percentage lower than 50. rear engine cars for example will typically have more weight over the rear wheels so often you'll see them with stiffer suspension settings in the rear this is just something to keep in mind while tuning now we move on to alignment and this is a big one camber adjusts your wheels vertical angle when facing the car head on negative camber means that the tops of the wheels will be pointing inward towards each other positive camber means the opposite the goal of camber adjustment is to put more of the tire in contact with the road while in a corner in track racing negative camber is always preferred but race suspension seems to usually give a bit too much start by bumping camber down a few notches in front and rear but this is a major setting we'll adjust to later now tow adjusts your wheels horizontal angle toe out means the front of your wheels will be pointing away from the car toe in means the opposite this is a setting to adjust sparingly small adjustments make a big change any tow at all will reduce top speed and increase tire temps and toe out can make the car feel less stable on front and all-wheel drive cars try starting with 0.1 or 0.2 degrees of front toe out to promote oversteer if you're still having problems you can add a bit of rear toe out as well on rear-wheel drive cars give the rear .1 or 0.2 degrees of rear toe in to help keep your rear end stable in corners finally for caster this adjusts your suspension's vertical angle when facing the side of the car lower caster angles means the suspension is more straight up and down higher positive angles rotate the steering axis towards the back of the car higher caster angles let you run less front negative camber because as you corner your wheels lean into the turn kind of like how a motorcycle would high caster adds camber while in a corner while not affecting camber on a straight think of it like dynamic camber it also changes how strongly the tires want to re-center and will change how the car feels quite a bit so this is a somewhat personal preference setting but keep things between four and seven degrees here i'm gonna start with six all right now for gearing this adjusts the gear ratios of your transmission final drive essentially adjusts everything at once and then moving down you can adjust each gear individually if you wish if you've added a decent bit of power to your car chances are good that your gearing is going to be too short take a look at the graph here each line represents a gear the leftmost line is first then second third and so on as you accelerate and move through the gears you're moving through the graph like so starting at 0 rpm and 0 miles per hour then accelerating in first up to about 50 miles per hour right at our red line just under 8000 rpm and then we shift into second climb speed and revs shift into third climb speed and revs and so on the bottom rightmost number for your speed is roughly the theoretical maximum of your car but if you've added a lot of power you'll notice that your last gear probably stops well before it hits the right of the graph so we can fix this easily by taking our final drive and shifting it more towards speed this means lengthening the gears until the top right of the last gears line goes just outside the right end of the graph this is a quick and dirty way to gear tune but it's plenty good enough for a base tune quick tip though i often find it helpful to extend first and second gear just a bit on high power rear wheel drive builds this helps you control throttle a bit better and maintain low speed grip and finally we arrive at tires and i think the basic mechanics of this are fairly self-explanatory higher tire pressure means more air in the tires it also changes the shape of the tire and as such how much of your tire is contacting the road we'll talk more about that later and luckily in horizon we really don't have to worry about tire wear so here it's all about grip temperatures and driving feel a higher psi will feel more responsive and will have a higher theoretical peak grip in most cases but will lose grip more suddenly lower pressures will heat up quickly and lose grip more progressively and not as much giving you more time to make corrections in a race setting keep things between about 26 and 35 psi having a higher front psi is generally preferred as it will help with turn in response and promote some good oversteer we'll look at this a lot more in our fine-tuning section and speaking of let's start to move into the second half of this video hopefully you now have a basic understanding of what each part of the tuning menu means how important they are and roughly what each setting does we've also made some slight adjustments already based on more universal tuning guidelines leaving us with a partially finished base tune now it's time to take it out on the track do some checks and finish our base tune we'll start by heading to a good spot to test our build at the festival sites race track is a great spot for this and then we'll open telemetry on pc hit t on your keyboard on xbox go to your settings and switch anna for telemetry then hit down on your d-pad you can do this on pc too welcome to the telemetry window we're only going to worry about the suspension tires and heat windows in this video let's start with suspension the white bars that fill with pink show us how much our suspension is compressing and expanding neutral load is right at 50 right where that little line is when the bar is fully pink the spring is fully compressed you never want to see that under normal driving conditions it means your suspension is bottoming out now keep in mind here that your car can bottom out without your suspension bottoming out these are not necessarily the same thing if the actual body of your car is bottoming out you'll usually notice that in the feel and sound your car is making but back to suspension take a lap around your favorite circuit with this window open and just make sure that your suspension isn't getting too close to bottoming out too often with properly set arbs spring rates and damping you should see the pink bar moving between about 20 to 80 percent of the bar if it's not moving that much overall you probably need to soften your suspension and if it's moving too much you need to stiffen it this does depend slightly on road condition and driving style though so if it's not moving a lot but the car still feels good don't worry too much about that next let's do one of two checks for camber switch to the tires and miscellaneous window and find the camber setting now let's take some corners and watch the outside tires on a right hand corner that's the left tire we'll start with the front you never want to see this go positive under normal steady cornering conditions a good camber setup on a low profile tire will only ever hit as low as negative 1 to negative 0.5 depending on the corner and the rest of the setup you still want negative camber values not neutral in a corner this is because the tire itself deforms from the rim so even if you have some negative camber in the corner your tire is still getting maximum contact patch with the road so if you're seeing camber value on either the front or the rear outside tire of a corner dip into positives at all it's time to up your negative camber next up is heat this is where we'll look at tire pressure and do another check on camber adjustment if your tires are blue it means they're too cold if they're orange to red too hot this is a setting that can be adjusted well by tire compounds but you can also play with pressures to dial in a better peak temperature peak grip occurs right around when you're shifting between clear and yellow the semi-transparent yellow is kind of the sweet spot solid yellow still great anything darker orange means your tires are getting too hot and you'll lose grip quickly the grip fall off for race tires is usually pretty steep now let's look at the temperature differences between the inside middle and outside of the tire the inside should be the hottest followed closely by the middle and the outside should be the coolest the difference between the inside and outside should never be more than about 20 degrees fahrenheit if it's greater than 20 degrees lessen your camber if your outside is hotter than your inside increase camber you want your overall temp differences to be within about 10 to 15 degrees fahrenheit there are a few other small things to look out for here too if you're outside and inside are warmer than your middle it generally means your tire pressure is too low and if your middle is hottest you should probably lower tire pressure anyway with that done and all your checks complete your base tune is set if you've followed the guidelines so far you should already have a car that's driving much better than it was stock but remember the base tune is just the start you may notice that there's some obvious shortcomings with your build and now it's time to figure out exactly what those are and how to solve them we'll start with oversteer and understeer this can occur in three main places and it can occur in more than one at a time the three places are corner entry mid corner and corner exit all-wheel and front-wheel drive cars are much more prone to understeer especially on corner entry and mid-corner with rear-wheel drive being more prone to oversteer where most issues show themselves towards corner exit when you're starting to get back on the throttle so first diagnose what sections of the corner the issue is happening in we'll start with corner entry if the car feels like it just doesn't want to turn into corners and resists your input that's corner entry understeer you can try adjusting front tire pressure for better peak grip softening the front springs and anti-roll bars or stiffening the rear adding a bit more toe out in front or rear increasing front down force or decreasing rear or reducing front diff d cell lock you can also increase front bump damping or reduce front rebound if you're noticing that the car plow understeers too much during braking specifically you can also move more brake bias towards the rear which reminder is flipped right now so move the slider towards front keep in mind here though that understeer is normal while braking now let's talk mid corner understeer this is once your car has settled into the corner and you're usually off the brakes and starting to apply some throttle a big sign of mid corner understeer is when you see the car turn in well and then try to straighten back out a bit a good setup should turn and lean in and stay turned in until corner exit anti-roll bars play a big role here instead of focusing on softening front though try stiffening rear same goes for rear suspension again look at downforce settings and also try increasing rear rebound and bump damping try playing with tire pressures camber and caster settings here too to find the maximum amount of grip for your front tires finally corner exit understeer this comes down largely to differential settings increasing rear bias on a center diff will help increasing rear excel lock or decreasing front excel lock will also help now if you're having all of these problems with oversteer in corner entry mid corner or exit you can pretty much just do all the opposite things i just suggested for understeer what causes understeer in one direction will usually cause oversteer by moving it in the other in rear wheel drive a lot of tuning goes into improving rear grip without introducing too much understeer focus your rear wheel drive grip builds on downforce bump stiffness and alignment but keep in mind that a lot of rear wheel builds just need more throttle management too alright so that covers the basics of over and understeer while cornering let's cover some other issues starting with responsiveness during transitions this plays into over and understeer but deserves its own mention if you notice that your car is turning well when you have enough time to set up for a corner but it under or oversteers while quickly transitioning from a left to a right bend for example that's mostly all in your damping and anti-roll bars if you notice the car gets thrown off really easily when you hit a curb or something that often has to do with your bump stiffness try setting it lower if you notice your tires just aren't getting hot enough increase downforce or try using tow to solve two problems at once cold tires and understeer add some toe out all around cold tires and oversteer toe in if you feel the car is too bouncy and shifting weight too much increase bump damping and spring stiffness if you feel you aren't braking well enough lessen front camber but make sure to increase caster to make up for it you can also try moving brake balance towards the back wheels a bit or try stiffening suspension in the front to move more braking grip to the rear this will only work if you're already maxing out your front braking power though if you're suffering from a lower than desired top speed drop your arrow and play with your final gear and that just about covers it now to wrap this video up i'm going to show you the potential fruits of your labors i've applied all the knowledge from this video to my r35 trying to account for that lack of front arrow and now i'll take it out to a rivals race with three different setups the stock tune the base tune we created and finally a refined tune using the troubleshooting steps we just covered on the stock tune here was my time the car understeered a lot due to the lack of that front arrow and it was just challenging not rewarding and not fun to drive and that shows in the lap time however with just the base tune applied we saw a pretty solid improvement in time the car feels much better to drive much more tuned into my own driving style and it's also improved the time a bit largely due to the fact that the base tune already compensates for the fact that we were expecting understeer in an all-wheel drive car tuning some of that out with just the base tune made the car much more drivable meaning i could carry more speed through corners and get back on full throttle sooner but there was still more work that could be done so finally here's my time with a complete tune this is a massive improvement over our stock time without improving the performance index or changing the actual parts of the car at all this is all just through tuning the car to maximize its potential and focus in on my personal driving style and that is what tuning is all about i know this video was a lot to take in it's totally normal to not understand tuning right away and although i've tried my best to pour all i know into this video while still keeping it as short and concise as possible the real learning happens by doing every car is different every driver is different and there are always exceptions to the rule what is fast for one car and one driver may not be fast with another car and driver and hopefully this guide lets you start finding out what makes you faster thank you for watching and stick around if you want to learn more this is just the beginning you

Channel: HokiHoshi

Views: 1,888,884

Keywords: fh5, tuning, how to, upgrades, camber, alignment, suspension, telemetry

Id: wkHNIBBw6Tw

Length: 32min 21sec (1941 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021