What controllers are you guys using? Does anyone have one of the CSR wheels? I’ve been drooling over them.
I’ve got an old Microsoft Force Feedback wheel which sits in your lap. It works surprisingly well. When my buddy comes over to race, he uses the Microsoft wireless wheel, which isn’t too bad.
I’m not sure if a wheel gives you an advantage over playing with a controller. I haven’t tried both.
I already did that.
No, the goal is to tune it to your preferences. Every so often when there are a few of us on at the same time we’ll get a race going. MacTech and I have raced each other with the Pintos and it’s an interesting result, mine is a rocketship and his carves turns, so in the end they end up about the same place.
You can do this with any number of cars, but the F-class cars are the most fun to do it with because you’re essentially starting with an empty canvas and building what you want.
As far as controllers go, I want a wheel but I’m stuck with the standard controller because I can’t justify the cost.
So I built an ugly but powerful Pinto tonight. It’s Burned Orange in color, in memory of all those flaming Pintos out there. Charitably, it’s a ‘work in progress’ - it handles like crap. I think I took your Pinto around Maple Valley about 4 seconds faster than mine. Guess I’ll have to keep tweaking.
Sam, I just took your Pinto out for a spin on the Top Gear test track, I was able to get it around the track in 1:23, not bad at all
I like your tune job, it’s actually pretty stable as long as you remember to feather the gas, it needs a light, deft touch to extract its potential, if you just mat the throttle, it’ll snap around and bite you, hard, be gentle with it and you’ll reap the dividends
I really like that you kept it rear drive, spend some quality time in it, learn its idiosyncrasies, and you may find you like it more than you do now
For comparison purposes;
I got a time of 1:18 in Doors’s “Boy George” Pinto
In Little Crazy Horse, I did it in 1:17
So, you’re not too far off from the Crazy Bunch, excellent first time tune job
OK, we need to get a club night together. Pick some cars, race them head-to-head, and may the best man win. AMC Hornets at ten paces, anybody?
I’m back in the Eastern time zone, so if we can schedule a night I can see if I can make it on.
So, my Pinto only has about 414 HP, and I think the other ones you guys have made have a lot more than that, but mine just freaks out if you try to apply power in anything but an extremely gentle fashion. Your cars seem to have a lot more grip. Yet I’ve put on the widest, biggest tires I can, lowered the suspension, added the aero kits, tuned the springs and roll bars to maximize rear end grip, etc. It’s still squirrely as hell.
Is there something I’m missing? Or do you just have to tweak it in tiny increments and try every tweak on the track until it gets into the zone?
Yeah, I can feather the throttle. I’ve been running it on Maple Valley to tune it, since it has so many nice altitude changes and a mix of sharp corners and sweepers. One problem the car has is that it’s really skittish with altitude changes - go over a hill with any power at all, and the thing goes sideways. I tried softening the suspension, but then it gets more unstable in the corners.
I guess I’ll have to go off and read some Forza forums and tuning FAQs and such and learn this properly. To date, I’ve just been driving stock cars mostly.
I like rear wheel drive in real life as well as in the game. I like being able to shift from understeer to oversteer with throttle. But now I’m thinking that maybe that Pinto has just too much power for RWD, and I might either have to change the shift points and rear diff to soften throttle response, or go to AWD.
I’m constantly amazed by this game. Some of those cars just feel right. I’ve owned 3 Datsun 240-Zs in real life, and the driving the Fairlady Z in the game feels like old home week.
I don’t know.. .that still seems like quite a difference for a short, flat track. I’ll have to try it on the Top Gear track and see how close to your time I can get.
Basically, this is my tuning strategy in one sentence;
Handling first, speed later
Basically, I work on sorting the handling and chassis dynamics first, once I get that dialed in to my liking, I then work on adding power, in gradual steps so I can adjust the handling to compensate for increased power
Here are some hints, based on my experience
Huge rims do nothing but cost money and induce understeer on front drive chassis cars, I tried my lightly tuned GTI with stock size rims and the biggest ones, and the car was more wallowy and understeer-ry with the bigguns
Cosmetic body kits do nothing but waste credits, make the car look stupid, add weight and screw up aerodynamics and balance, if you must put wings on your car, use the Forza Adjustable ones, they may look just as stupid as the cosmetic ones, but they allow you to dial in more downforce
Racing anti-roll bars stiffen up the ride, but in the process, also add more understeer
If possible, always convert a front wheel drive car to rear wheel drive, it balances out the chassis dynamics dramatically, if you have AWD, purchase the race limited slip diff, it’s adjustable, and use it to send most of your power to the rear (I prefer 90/10 or 95/5 rear/front power balance)
I prefer superchargers to turbochargers, as the power is on tap the instant you ask for it, no turbo lag
Basically, my tuning procedure for a new car is this;
1; install racing tires, upgrade tire size to max. To maximize the contact patch on the road, install race air intake and exhaust, perform race weight reduction…
2; win enough races in this car to reach Affinity Level 4, at which point all parts (except the bigger engine and forced induction systems) are FREE
3; perform rear drive conversion on front drivers, then go as wild or mild as I want to on the new car, with the parts being free, I could max it out, but I tend to want to keep the car as balanced as possible, there are some cars that you CAN upgrade to crazy levels, but you really SHOULDN’T, as they tend to become, well, undriveable…
Hmm… I tried some of your suggestions, and you’re right but they contradict what the game is indicating.
For example, the game says that bigger rims mean tires with less sidewall, and therefore more predictable handling, better turn-in, etc. And that’s what they do in the real world (within reason). But I went back to stock wheel sizes (probably 13" or 14"), and according to the game stats, my cornering is a little better and unsprung weight is down. So it kind of looks like taller wheels don’t have any positive effect. At least not on the Pinto.
The body kits aren’t cosmetic - if you look at the second page of stats when you select the aero kits, they show you what improves and what doesn’t. For example, the front chin spoiler I put on the car improved handling by a couple of tenths, but lowered top end speed a bit. Are you saying that those effects are trivial and not worth doing?
I played around with the Pinto a bit more today - to my way of thinking, the big problem with it is that it makes too much power at low RPM, and over-powers the tires. So I can either cut back on the power, which hurts top end speed, or I considered trying to lower the final drive ratio to move the power curve up the speed band. Unfortunately, I took the car out and it seemed about a second slower around Maple Valley with that change.
How much do you have to change the stats to see an effect? Should I be making changes one ‘click’ at a time? Or do I need to make big changes to see a measurable difference? Maybe I’m going too far in each direction and over-shooting the optimum settings.
Or maybe I’m just hoping for too much from a Pinto!
Sam, in your car as it is right now I cracked 1:20 on the Top Gear Test Track. I strongly suspect that it’s down to driving style. If you couldn’t tell, I like my stuff completely unhinged and right on the edge. Sometimes that sucks, like when my Pinto does three high-speed barrel rolls down the straight at Sebring. Yes, that did happen. It was pretty cool.
Well, I just tried it and the best I can get is a 1:22, so clearly driving is a factor and I’m not quite up to par yet. But how fast do you go around in your Pinto?
I just tried driving your Pinto (I think it was yours), and got about the same time I got in mine, but I didn’t drive it nearly as well. I’ll bet that if it’s handled right, it’s probably 5 seconds faster than mine around that track. It feels like your springs might be set up a little softer than mine - I get a lot of front end lift and dip with throttle change. Or is it because you’ve got a V8 in there?
Let’s see…
1:14.803, and that’s with much drama in the turns. Your car is so much more balanced than mine is, but I do like running it nuts out and fighting the turns, it seems to be faster for me.
That said, I just ran a car for an Achievement that was, to put it mildly, terrible. The Porsche 911 (997) Turbo. Oh yeah, it was fast. In a straight line. Its dynamics we’re appalling in every other way, though. Check this out: it had massive turbo lag, tail-happy steering, and truly astounding understeer. To save the tail you had to let up on the turns, except the understeer didn’t let you recover. Add to that the lag that made you have to power on about a half-mile before the turn just so you could power out of it and you have a mess of contradictions. Horrible car. It is the only car that actually forced me to race for a win against the AI in months. It made me look really, really bad.
EDIT: I have a twin-turbo V-8 and hella short gearing so the acceleration is ridiculous, but the top end blows and the steering is a dice roll at best. Hit some curbing and you’ll go over if you’re carrying any speed at all, I guarantee it. If we raced Le Mans you’d smoke me, but on short track with lots of turns I can out accelerate you and fight my way through the turns.
With the flying start I got it down to 1:12.674. The next lap I spun, the lap after that I flipped it into a braking distance marker. It’s unbelievably fast, but extraordinarily unpredictable.
Wow, 1:12 is pretty amazing. You must be hitting the lines dead on.
Do you try to run that track clean? I’m WAY slower if I try to run a track clean, but it seems to me that if you’re comparing times for the purposes of tuning, you’d want to control the parameters of the race as closely as possible. Not that I managed to run it clean, mind you…
I always try to run a clean lap. If you race the AI one thing will never cease to piss you off: if you’re in front and the guy behind you picks up any hint of a draft, you get a bad lap. Therefore, in the higher classes your first lap will always be bad, no matter how well you might run it.
Now that this thread has been somewhat revived, I don’t feel bad about bumping it to post my thoughts on the '62 Lincoln Continental.
Bottom line: it’s another lead sled. This one, however, came with some power. Bone-stock I did Fujimi Kaido in 11:05.643. It accelerated nicely up the hills, power-slid in the downhills, it was a lot like the Country Squire and the '59 Cadillac, but with a 7-liter engine it was simply more powerful.
I put all the go-fast bits on and did it again. The time? 9:37.034. It was much more responsive and much less responsive all at the same time. There’s just too much mass to overcome for it to handle like a sports car, but the steering was quick and it wanted to turn like one.
Like all the others it is a fun car in its own way, and like all the others it smoked the King Cobra. What a dog that car is.
I decided to call the Pinto finished, and went on to work on a car that actually handles pretty good out of the box: The Fairlady Z. I added it to the club garage - it’s the same color as the one I used to own. Boy I miss that car.
I’ve got that one set up just the way I want it, I think. It’s an A600 class car - I wanted to make it handle as best I could, which meant staying with the stock engine to keep the 50/50 weight distribution.
My stats with it:
Nurburgring: 9:24
Maple Valley: 1:29
Fuji Kaido full: 10:13
I’m assuming you’re going with the first generation Fairlady. When I started playing back in February that was my go-to car. I always ran the old-school metal and that was the first car I could really afford. No real vices and, as you have seen, easily upgreadeable. I’ll give yours a run later.
NM
Forza’s newest DLC is coming next week. They call it the Pennzoil car pack. One might think that we would be sick and tired of paying for new cars every month, and I’ll bet you’d be right in that I strongly suspect the buy rates are way down, but nevertheless they still manage to offer a few cars that I want so I end up buying. This one is no different. The cars:
2013 Viper #91 SRT Motorsport GTS-R: Yay, another Viper. Next.
2013 Viper #93 SRT Motorsport GTS-R: OK, now that’s just lazy. A re-skin in the same pack? What is this, the Porsche pack? OK, now I’m annoyed.
1968 Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale: Old iron. Good. I like the older stuff better anyway.
1960 Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato: Much as I like Astons, there are enough that I’m indifferent about this one.
1958 Austin-Healey Sprite Mark I: Wantwantwantwantwant. I’ve always liked the Bugeye Sprite simply because it’s, well, bugeyed. It’s Matchbox weird. Hence its appeal for me.
1953 Chevrolet Corvette: Another Corvette. Ho-hum. Except that this is the original one, which has an appeal all its own. I’ll buy it, and after I hit level 50 with AMC I might actually use it a bit.
1965 MG MGB GT: I like the MGB, but I’ll probably use the Bugeye more.
1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR: The most infamous car in history, the car that holds the all-time crowd-kill record. I wonder if they modeled the air brake, or if it ignites when it hits something hard enough.
1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia: YES! Here’s the big winner for me, it hits my air-cooled V-Dub button squarely. Yes, I know it’s just a Beetle in a tuxedo, but emotional responses have no sense about them. Now I want a Thing and a Bus, maybe an SP2, dammit! Stop teasing me.
1983 GMC Vandura G-1500: Yes. it’s the A-Team van. That paint job will be up 5 seconds after release. Otherwise it’s a silly inclusion, just something that someone thought would be funny. It is, but not that funny.
2011 Citroen DS4: Wrong Deesse. Give us the original, and while you’re at it throw in the 2CV and the SM from back when Citroen was both the ugliest and most innovative car manufacturer around. These new Citroens have no appeal to me.
Not a bad pack, overall. All I really need now is a 1975 Matador coupe (ugh, but it’s AMC) and a 1975 Chevrolet Cosworth Vega and I’ll be happy.
It occurs to me that thanks to all of these cars we can have some fairly unique race possibilities. Air-cooled cars, FIA rally cars, Trans-Am racers, LeMans prototypes, '80s poster children… we simply HAVE to get a club night one of these days.
That said, what the game really needs is more tracks. Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, Imola, Riverside, Kyalami, Talladega or Daytona, there are lots to choose from, old and new. How 'bout it? They could get another year of life out of the game on top of the upcoming Forza Horizon if they gave us another 10 tracks.