Forza Motorsport 2: Tuning Your Car

Anyone can buy upgrades to the car you've bought to make it go faster & beat the opposition, but there's a more technical side to making your car go faster & it could save you quite a bit of money in game.

This technique is called tuning & over the last month or so it has become a very popular thing with people tuning their cars to specific tracks or tuning them for drift competitions & selling their tuned car on the Auction House. With this guide, I hope to give a general view to tuning & set whoever reads this on the right road to tuning. The car I will be using as a base is a Mazda Familia & I will be tuning it for circuit racing on Tsukuba. So basically focusing on grip & acceleration. Lets begin.

Before you can tune your car, you do need to buy a few upgrades for it. Basically, everything in racing specification from the Performance & Handling bit of the upgrades menu. I did not get any weight reduction on my car as I wanted to keep it in the class it is in (D 397). Here is a list of everything I bought for it:

Endless: Race Brakes
Tein: Race Springs & Dampers
Tanabe: Race Anti-roll Bars
MAZDASPEED: Race Transmission
Ogura: Race Clutch
ACT: Race Flywheel
MAZDASPEED: Race Driveline
Cusco: Race Differential

I did get some upgrades for the wheels & these were:

Toyo Tires: Race compound
Maximum Tire Width
Maximum Rim Size
Konig: Theory Style Rims

The Wheel & Rim upgrades have nothing to do with the tuning, were something I quite liked so I went for it. The upgraded tires, wheel width & rim size will give your help your cars handling & braking so it might worth it. Now, onto the tuning.

Tsukuba is a very short circuit with 14 turns, 3 of them being hairpins, so what we need to get the most out of the car is acceleration & cornering.

Gearing:

There are two ways of doing the gearing, the advanced method & the simplified method. With the advanced method you can adjust a single gear at a time to your liking, making things more complicated to the beginner. The simplified method involves adjusting the final drive which is basically, all the gears. I went for the simple method & adjusted the final drive much more towards acceleration (5.00 to be precise), this will give you much better acceleration coming out of corners & will also bring that 6th gear into play. I would use this setting for Tsukuba but for something like the Nurburgring, I would adjust more for speed but still keep that acceleration, lowering the final drive down to 4.00 for example.

Springs & ride height:

Tsukuba isn't a bumpy track, so I adjusted my springs to a more stiffer setting. Not much, just a little, & the ride height I lowered as far as it could go. Again with the Nurburgring I would adjust the springs so they are slightly softer & I would raise the ride height a touch.

Tire Pressure:

This is an interesting one. I only adjusted the tire pressure before I made the changes to the tire compound. I adjusted the tire pressure to a slightly high setting & it seemed to give the car a very nice kick going into turns. I would recommend this for forward-wheel drive cars but not for rear-wheel drive cars. There is a bit of bad news about this. Adjusting the tire pressure to a higher setting will cause the tires to wear out much quicker, so it's best not to set the pressure too high.

That's about all that I did to my Mazda Familia. I didn't really touch any of the other settings, but when I do I will properly post another, more in-depth guide. The adjustments I made to the car suite me well & that is something you should look for when tuning. Something your happy with. Just as a comparison, my lap time around Tsukuba before tuning was around 1:07 - 1:10. After tuning I can get it round in 1:03 - 1:05. It's not that much but it does show what can be done with a tuned car.

I hope this guide has been helpful to you & good luck with your tuning.