Our Forza Motorsport Tuning Guide is the key to maxing out your car's performance in Microsoft's flagship racer. Learn all the different settings for tuning your car and how to make it fast(er). Additionally, we will also give you some handy tuning tricks to squeeze further tenths out of your car.
Image credit: Microsoft/Turn10
In our Forza Motorsport Tuning Guide, we will go through all the different parameters, explain what they do and thus help you in tuning your car to make it a track dominator.
But before we start, please note that most cars in Forza Motorsport are not race cars but production cars built for public roads. Out of the box these cars lack the parts to fine-tune their driving behavior. Luckily though, we can change that. How? By installing new parts, of course! All it takes is a bit of grind (i.e. car leveling). Then we eventually can invest our car points for new parts in the upgrade shop.
For road cars, that can indeed be quite a drag, we know. But fortunately it does not apply to race cars, as these come with all those necessary parts already installed. This includes the Forza GT cars or the touring cars which are used in the online spec series! You also can download community setups – which is occasionally good, but mostly not. So why trust in others that might have a completely different driving style than you do? Let us instead set up the car on our own!
Therefore it is best to use the telemetry menu while driving. To activate it, you will need the Quick Action buttons assigned to 4 buttons on your wheel, or you can use the d-pad on a controller. While driving, press down and then the left or right buttons to scroll trough the different pages to the telemetry.
Here, you can see the temperatures and pressures – and you can have a look whether they stay in your desired range after a view laps, as the pressures will rise a bit with warming tires. What you want on street tires is no more than 80 degrees Celsius. Sport tires may get a bit warmer up until 95 degrees. Race tires can even get hotter up to 105 degrees.
Changing the final drive ratio can significantly alter your car's acceleration and top speed. A higher final drive ratio will result in quicker acceleration but lower top speed. Conversely, a shorter final drive ratio will yield a higher top speed but slower acceleration. Finding the right balance highly depends on the track layout!
Find the fastest spot on the track and see which gear you are currently using and how fast you are going. Chose the final drive to that you will reach your maximum speed in the highest gear and still have some room left before you hit the limiter. That will come in handy when you are behind another car on the straight and gain that little bit of extra speed in the slipstream. Like this, your acceleration will always be the best it can and you will never hit the rev limiter wasting any performance.
You can then further fine-tune each individual gear. For example, to avoid wheelspin with high-performance rear wheel drive cars, you could make the first three gears a tad longer to have more time to get the power down. Or you could change one gear, so you won’t have to shift in a certain corner right before the braking point.
However, excessive negative camber can lead to reduced straight-line stability, less grip overall and uneven tire wear. So as always, balance is the key.
Luckily for us, we can use the telemetry tool again. It shows the temperatures for the outside, middle, and inside of your tire. In contrast to other games, what we want in Forza Motorsport is an (almost) even spread of temps out of every turn.
So set up the camber somewhere between -2 and -1 degrees and see how the temperatures will be. Are the three numbers relatively even after a corner? If your answer is 'yes', you have found the sweetspot! You should lower the negative camber, if the inside is too hot. With the outside hotter than the inside, you need more camber.
Positive camber, on the other hand, is not something we really want in race cars, as it will reduce grip overall. So do not go that way.
Our tip is to go only baby steps here. So maybe a bit of toe-out on the fronts to get better turn-in and a tad toe-in on the rear for the straight-line stability and less oversteer.
So what we want is a high, positive caster without adding too much camber to our tire. Usually that is around the default setting of 5 up until 6. So set this up last and see how your temperatures have changed and change the camber accordingly.
Softer springs offer a smoother ride and better traction on bumpy roads but can lead to excessive body roll, affecting cornering performance.
Usually, a softer spring is what we want in Forza as it almost has no downsides. We only have to make sure that the car is not bottoming out – so that the spring never fully compresses and the tire hits the bump stop.
So head to the track, select this screen in the telemetry UI and go for one or two laps. You can see your spring rate here and this white bar that shows how far the spring is being compressed. Have a look at the number displayed and find out what the highest number on your lap is.
Afterwards head back to the settings screen and lower the spring rate to what you noted as the highest number, plus some buffer for bad times. Avoid this number to reach 1.0. Otherwise, your car is bottoming out.
Keep in mind how heavy and especially where the weight of the car is. A front engine car like the Viper GT3 has more weight on the front and might need stiffer springs at the front as a result. The opposite goes for the Porsche with its engine on the rear.
Damping settings, including bump and rebound, control how quickly the suspension reacts to bumps and weight transfer. So, the spring is the travel distance, and the damper controls the speed we compress and decompress the suspension.
Adjusting damping can improve ride comfort and control over various road conditions. Softer damper settings allow for more suspension movement, which can be beneficial for comfort but may impact handling precision. Stiffer damper settings reduce body motion but may lead to a harsher ride.
Usually, our damping settings should match our spring settings which is why we orientate ourselves at the settings we chose for the springs. The sliders do match here, so we can take that as a reference for the bump setting. The rebound on the other hand should always be stiffer than the spring by one third.
Awesome! But this does not mean that we have yet found the perfect settings already for the springs and dampers. After adjusting the ARBs in the next step, we should take the car for a spin and see whether the handling is stable or not and whether there is a lot of movement in the chassis. Then going stiffer in small increments is advised.
Softer anti-roll bars allow the car to lean more into a turn and put more load on the outside tire – which leads to more mid-corner grip. The downside to this is the performance in slower corners. A soft front roll bar needs more time to react and introduces understeer on corner entry. A stiff rear roll bar makes the backend of the car turn in quicker as well – which can give you just the right amount of slip angle to take corners faster. Too much though and your car will spin faster than you can say anti-roll bar three times. Anti-roll bar, anti-roll bar, ant- – bam!
Setting up the roll bars is highly subjective, and you will need to find your own groove here. Some players like soft bars and (slightly) understeery cars, as they offer a lot of confidence without any oversteer. Others like vehicles which they have to literally fight through the corner, the more response and snappy the better. So find out what kind of driver your are and find your sweetspots for each car/track combination.
Are the default FFB settings in Forza Motorsport driving you nuts? Then check out our Forza Motorsport FFB Settings Guide!
The roll center height offset seems to be a roll bar-esque setting that influences the car's handling more on entry and exit rather than mid-corner. So, a bit stiffer setting at the front can increase responsiveness. The same goes for the rear – although a higher setting will lead to less grip at the exit. Hence, reducing this in wet weather might be a good choice to aid traction in low grip situations.
The Anti Geometry Percent setting is kind of unnecessary in our opinion. This influences how far the car leans to the front under braking and to the rear under acceleration. Car behavior you usually would fine-tune with the spring and damper settings. But this is like a roll bar for front-to-rear axle – and although nothing we have ever seen anywhere else, something we can take advantage of. A higher setting can help stabilize the car under braking and acceleration but will also lower the amount of grip-load at that side of the car in the respective phase.
Increasing the wing angle at the front can reduce understeer, but at the same time can lead to more oversteer at the rear. Adversely, adding more downforce to the rear will get rid of oversteer in fast turns but will also introduce understeer at the front in return.
You see, finding the right balance is crucial. And there is another super important aspect! More wing always means more drag which will lower your top speed massively! Especially in Forza Motorsport this will ruin online races for you big time.
We think: the lower you can go, the better. Especially when racing online against humans. Keep the sliders relatively close to each other and try to avoid big discrepancies. This will only mess up car's balance. Then, fine-tune from there. Still struggling with understeer? Push the front a bit higher up. Too much oversteer? Raise the rear downforce level.
To be honest, this is not what we would expect from a real car – as a brake balance of under 50% usually leads to the car spinning out because of the rear brakes locking up. But in this game, this will improve your braking performance massively!
Image credit: Lesics.com
In Forza we can set up the car between an open diff – that would be 0% - and is the state where both wheels are allowed to spin at their own pace. And a closed or locked diff – 100% - where we force the wheels to rotate at the same speed.
The problem with open diffs is that we lose traction under power, as all the force will go to the tire that spins the easiest. In a corner this leads to the inside tire spinning, as it has not enough grip to transmit the force on its own.
How do you like this guide? Have you found and want to share some of your own tuning tips for Forza? Tell us on X (Twitter) at @OverTake_gg or in the comments down below!
Image credit: Microsoft/Turn10
In our Forza Motorsport Tuning Guide, we will go through all the different parameters, explain what they do and thus help you in tuning your car to make it a track dominator.
But before we start, please note that most cars in Forza Motorsport are not race cars but production cars built for public roads. Out of the box these cars lack the parts to fine-tune their driving behavior. Luckily though, we can change that. How? By installing new parts, of course! All it takes is a bit of grind (i.e. car leveling). Then we eventually can invest our car points for new parts in the upgrade shop.
For road cars, that can indeed be quite a drag, we know. But fortunately it does not apply to race cars, as these come with all those necessary parts already installed. This includes the Forza GT cars or the touring cars which are used in the online spec series! You also can download community setups – which is occasionally good, but mostly not. So why trust in others that might have a completely different driving style than you do? Let us instead set up the car on our own!
#1 Tires And Tire Pressure
Our first stop in the Upgrade and Tuning Menu is tires and the tire pressure. In Europe, the units are called BAR – our American friends say PSI instead. How does the car's handling change when we alter the tire pressure?Tires
Higher tire pressures result in a more responsive and nimbler feel. This can be beneficial on smoother tracks or for quick cornering. However, it may reduce overall grip and make the car less forgiving, especially on bumpy terrain. On the other hand, lower tire pressures offer increased traction and a smoother ride. But they might lead to overheating and excessive wear during longer races. And also, the turn-in is compromised.
Therefore it is best to use the telemetry menu while driving. To activate it, you will need the Quick Action buttons assigned to 4 buttons on your wheel, or you can use the d-pad on a controller. While driving, press down and then the left or right buttons to scroll trough the different pages to the telemetry.
Here, you can see the temperatures and pressures – and you can have a look whether they stay in your desired range after a view laps, as the pressures will rise a bit with warming tires. What you want on street tires is no more than 80 degrees Celsius. Sport tires may get a bit warmer up until 95 degrees. Race tires can even get hotter up to 105 degrees.
Tire Pressures
Now we will check the pressures, and we want to make sure that they are in a range between 2.2 to 2.35 bar or 32 to 34 psi. Which is a lot when you compare it to other racing games – but seems to be the best operating window in Forza.#2 Gearing
Next is the gearing config. Here, we can set up our cars top speed and acceleration. You can change the gears individually here or adjust the overall final drive.Changing the final drive ratio can significantly alter your car's acceleration and top speed. A higher final drive ratio will result in quicker acceleration but lower top speed. Conversely, a shorter final drive ratio will yield a higher top speed but slower acceleration. Finding the right balance highly depends on the track layout!
Find the fastest spot on the track and see which gear you are currently using and how fast you are going. Chose the final drive to that you will reach your maximum speed in the highest gear and still have some room left before you hit the limiter. That will come in handy when you are behind another car on the straight and gain that little bit of extra speed in the slipstream. Like this, your acceleration will always be the best it can and you will never hit the rev limiter wasting any performance.
You can then further fine-tune each individual gear. For example, to avoid wheelspin with high-performance rear wheel drive cars, you could make the first three gears a tad longer to have more time to get the power down. Or you could change one gear, so you won’t have to shift in a certain corner right before the braking point.
#3 Alignment
The Alignment settings feature multiple important adjustment options. But first: What is camber, toe, and caster? And how do we tune them to our advantage?
Camber
Camber refers to the angle at which the wheels are tilted in relation to the vertical axis when viewed from the front or rear of the vehicle. Negative camber (tilting the top of the tires inward) increases the contact patch of the tires while cornering, improving grip during turns. In a left-hander the weight shifts to the right tires which gets them a better contact patch with the road with more negative camber. How much negative camber you need exactly depends on the corner speeds and the track surface overall.However, excessive negative camber can lead to reduced straight-line stability, less grip overall and uneven tire wear. So as always, balance is the key.
Luckily for us, we can use the telemetry tool again. It shows the temperatures for the outside, middle, and inside of your tire. In contrast to other games, what we want in Forza Motorsport is an (almost) even spread of temps out of every turn.
So set up the camber somewhere between -2 and -1 degrees and see how the temperatures will be. Are the three numbers relatively even after a corner? If your answer is 'yes', you have found the sweetspot! You should lower the negative camber, if the inside is too hot. With the outside hotter than the inside, you need more camber.
Positive camber, on the other hand, is not something we really want in race cars, as it will reduce grip overall. So do not go that way.
Toe
Toe refers to the angle at which the front and rear wheels are pointed inward (called toe-in) or outward (toe-out) when viewed from above. These settings affect the car's stability and its responsiveness. Toe-in provides better straight-line stability but can make the car less responsive to steering inputs. Toe-out can enhance corner entry and responsiveness but may reduce stability.
Our tip is to go only baby steps here. So maybe a bit of toe-out on the fronts to get better turn-in and a tad toe-in on the rear for the straight-line stability and less oversteer.
Caster
Caster is the angle at which the steering axis, so your suspension, tilts backward or forward when viewed from the side. It primarily affects steering feel and self-centering. More positive caster (where the steering axis tilts backward) enhances straight-line stability and helps the steering wheel return to center after a turn. It also increases the lean on the tire when the vehicle is cornering. The only downsides really are that your steering will get stiffer, and it will increase your camber angle.
So what we want is a high, positive caster without adding too much camber to our tire. Usually that is around the default setting of 5 up until 6. So set this up last and see how your temperatures have changed and change the camber accordingly.
#4 Suspension
Next, we need to fine-tune the suspension settings, which include Anti-Roll Bars, Springs, and Dampers. They all work hand in hand, and all play a key role in the cars handling characteristics. We recommend to start with the springs and dampers before making use of the most powerful tool, the Anti-Roll bars.Springs
Adjusting the spring rate influences how a car responds to bumps and weight transfer. Stiffer springs provide less body roll during cornering, resulting in improved stability and quicker response to steering inputs. However, a very stiff setup can make the ride harsh, reducing traction on uneven surfaces.
Softer springs offer a smoother ride and better traction on bumpy roads but can lead to excessive body roll, affecting cornering performance.
Usually, a softer spring is what we want in Forza as it almost has no downsides. We only have to make sure that the car is not bottoming out – so that the spring never fully compresses and the tire hits the bump stop.
So head to the track, select this screen in the telemetry UI and go for one or two laps. You can see your spring rate here and this white bar that shows how far the spring is being compressed. Have a look at the number displayed and find out what the highest number on your lap is.
Afterwards head back to the settings screen and lower the spring rate to what you noted as the highest number, plus some buffer for bad times. Avoid this number to reach 1.0. Otherwise, your car is bottoming out.
Keep in mind how heavy and especially where the weight of the car is. A front engine car like the Viper GT3 has more weight on the front and might need stiffer springs at the front as a result. The opposite goes for the Porsche with its engine on the rear.
Ride Height (Rake)
We could also raise the car off the ground to be able to use softer springs on a bumpy track. But that will lead to less grip and lower top-end speed. Usually, you could raise the rear end of a car (add rake), which usually adds some downforce for some trade-off oversteer. But this does not seem to work in Forza – so keep the car as low to the ground as possible.Damping
Next are the dampers which are sadly not something we can overengineer in Motec like we would in games like Assetto Corsa Competizione. In Forza Motorsport, we have to keep it simple.Damping settings, including bump and rebound, control how quickly the suspension reacts to bumps and weight transfer. So, the spring is the travel distance, and the damper controls the speed we compress and decompress the suspension.
Adjusting damping can improve ride comfort and control over various road conditions. Softer damper settings allow for more suspension movement, which can be beneficial for comfort but may impact handling precision. Stiffer damper settings reduce body motion but may lead to a harsher ride.
Usually, our damping settings should match our spring settings which is why we orientate ourselves at the settings we chose for the springs. The sliders do match here, so we can take that as a reference for the bump setting. The rebound on the other hand should always be stiffer than the spring by one third.
Awesome! But this does not mean that we have yet found the perfect settings already for the springs and dampers. After adjusting the ARBs in the next step, we should take the car for a spin and see whether the handling is stable or not and whether there is a lot of movement in the chassis. Then going stiffer in small increments is advised.
Anti-Roll Bars (ARB)
Okay, but now to your bread and butter to correct unwanted driving characteristics, the anti-roll bars. They connect the left and right sides of the suspension and influence how the car resists body roll during cornering. This is your all-purpose answer when it comes to mechanical grip, i.e. how much grip the tires can load mid-corner. A softer front anti-roll bar can reduce understeer, while a softer rear ARB can reduce oversteer.
Softer anti-roll bars allow the car to lean more into a turn and put more load on the outside tire – which leads to more mid-corner grip. The downside to this is the performance in slower corners. A soft front roll bar needs more time to react and introduces understeer on corner entry. A stiff rear roll bar makes the backend of the car turn in quicker as well – which can give you just the right amount of slip angle to take corners faster. Too much though and your car will spin faster than you can say anti-roll bar three times. Anti-roll bar, anti-roll bar, ant- – bam!
Setting up the roll bars is highly subjective, and you will need to find your own groove here. Some players like soft bars and (slightly) understeery cars, as they offer a lot of confidence without any oversteer. Others like vehicles which they have to literally fight through the corner, the more response and snappy the better. So find out what kind of driver your are and find your sweetspots for each car/track combination.
Are the default FFB settings in Forza Motorsport driving you nuts? Then check out our Forza Motorsport FFB Settings Guide!
#5 Suspension Geometry
Now we come to something that is new to Forza Motorsport and we have not seen in any other racing game, the suspension geometry.The roll center height offset seems to be a roll bar-esque setting that influences the car's handling more on entry and exit rather than mid-corner. So, a bit stiffer setting at the front can increase responsiveness. The same goes for the rear – although a higher setting will lead to less grip at the exit. Hence, reducing this in wet weather might be a good choice to aid traction in low grip situations.
The Anti Geometry Percent setting is kind of unnecessary in our opinion. This influences how far the car leans to the front under braking and to the rear under acceleration. Car behavior you usually would fine-tune with the spring and damper settings. But this is like a roll bar for front-to-rear axle – and although nothing we have ever seen anywhere else, something we can take advantage of. A higher setting can help stabilize the car under braking and acceleration but will also lower the amount of grip-load at that side of the car in the respective phase.
#6 Aero
What the roll bars are for medium-speed corners, the aero settings are for fast turns. Choosing a higher wing angle adds downforce to the front or rear of the car and pushes the vehicle to the ground, adding grip.Increasing the wing angle at the front can reduce understeer, but at the same time can lead to more oversteer at the rear. Adversely, adding more downforce to the rear will get rid of oversteer in fast turns but will also introduce understeer at the front in return.
You see, finding the right balance is crucial. And there is another super important aspect! More wing always means more drag which will lower your top speed massively! Especially in Forza Motorsport this will ruin online races for you big time.
Higher Wings Or Lower Wings?
Admittedly, there are a lot of benefits when driving with higher wing settings in this game. Traction will increase massively and your confidence in the car will be way higher to push to the limit. But you will lose time on the straights – where skill is basically not needed. So, it is your decision. Are you ready to struggle a bit in the corners where your opposition will have a hard time overtaking anyhow for the benefit of gaining half a second on the straight? Or do you prefer being able to nail every turn perfectly hoping not to lose too much time on the straights gainst your opponents who opted for a lower wing setting?
We think: the lower you can go, the better. Especially when racing online against humans. Keep the sliders relatively close to each other and try to avoid big discrepancies. This will only mess up car's balance. Then, fine-tune from there. Still struggling with understeer? Push the front a bit higher up. Too much oversteer? Raise the rear downforce level.
#7 Brakes
Brake Balance
The first slider is the brakes balance, so a percentage of how much braking force is shifted to the front tires compared to the rear. Usually, we recommend to go somewhere between 55 and 48 in Forza, sweetspotting at 49 or 48.
To be honest, this is not what we would expect from a real car – as a brake balance of under 50% usually leads to the car spinning out because of the rear brakes locking up. But in this game, this will improve your braking performance massively!
Brake Pressure
The brake pressure is something highly subjective. Leave it at 100% when in doubt. When you are experiencing lock-ups, reduce this in small steps until you find your sweetspot.#8 Differential
Our second to last page is the differential settings. It allows the wheels on the same axle to rotate at different speeds, providing several essential functions. When a car turns, the outer wheel has to travel a longer distance than the inner wheel. Without a differential, this speed difference would cause tire scrubbing, stress on the drivetrain, and difficulties in turning.
In Forza we can set up the car between an open diff – that would be 0% - and is the state where both wheels are allowed to spin at their own pace. And a closed or locked diff – 100% - where we force the wheels to rotate at the same speed.
The problem with open diffs is that we lose traction under power, as all the force will go to the tire that spins the easiest. In a corner this leads to the inside tire spinning, as it has not enough grip to transmit the force on its own.
Differential For RWD Cars
Sounds super complicated but is quite easy to set up in Forza! We have a slider for on-throttle and off-throttle. For rear wheel drive cars go between 40-60% for acceleration, and to 20-40% for deceleration. If you notice oversteer on exit, lower the acceleration by a few percent. To get rid of oversteer at corner entry, lowering the deceleration slider can help.
Differential For FWD Cars
For front wheel drive cars that is a bit different, as the front tires are more needed here and will set the car straight on acceleration. The perfect range for accceleration is 20-30%, and for deceleration it is 0-10%. Increase the acceleration percentage to tackle exit understeer. Increase the deceleration slider if you want to get rid of turn in oversteer.
#9 Steering Wheel
Force Feedback Scale
Lastly, there are the steering wheel settings. The Force Feedback scale can help you find the right FFB stiffness for the driven car, without you having to change that slider in the overall FFB gain setting in the options menu.
Steering Lock Range
Steering lock range changes the amount of steering necessary. Thus you can make the steering snappier or way looser than stock. We recommend to leave it 100%.#10 More Help And Info On Forza Motorsport
- Are the default FFB settings in Forza Motorsport driving you nuts? Then here comes your savior! In our Forza Motorsport Force Feedback Settings Guide you will learn how to optimize these settings and unleash the full potential of the game and your steering wheel.
- Check also our video review of Forza Motorsport where we talk about the strengths and weaknesses of this new title in detail.
- For more guides for many popular racing games, visit our Tutorials section.
How do you like this guide? Have you found and want to share some of your own tuning tips for Forza? Tell us on X (Twitter) at @OverTake_gg or in the comments down below!
