Our beginner tutorial explains the basics of car setup and customization in Forza Horizon 4.
Photo credit: Microsoft
A car is like a suit: it is a great thing to own, but it only becomes awesome when it fits with your style. That is why tuning is a great thing to do in Forza Horizon 4. Adjusting your vehicle to your driving style improves your drive and results by a landslide. Our beginner guide shows you the most important sections to tune on your car and explains the effect on your experience.
The perfect tire setup
Tires are one of the most crucial points of every setup. First of all, it is up to you to choose the type of tire, depending on what you aim to use your car for. Choose from drag, snow, street and many other options. In most cases, the race tires are a great pick.
After you have fitted your set of tires, it is time to adjust their pressure. Higher pressure generates more top speed and responsiveness of the car but puts you in danger of a sudden loss of grip. Lowering tire pressure provides more grip and stability in corners, as the car is not going to respond as easily to your inputs. Also, lower pressure leads to higher tire temperatures. At the perfect temperature the tires will give you more grip, but do not overheat them, as this leads to more tire wear.
Make sure you test your tire setup and regularly use the in-game telemetry tool to monitor the temperatures as they are also dependent on the weather and outdoor temperature.
Improve gearing with the final drive
The perfect gearing settings are going to help you get an ideal start and maximum speed out of your car. A good setting to begin with is tweaking the final drive. Change it so that all six gears appear in the graphic in the bottom right-hand corner. Your sixth gear line should end in the top right corner on the red line.
From there on, it is up to you to test and see whether you want specific gears to have more or less range. Adjusting the gearing is a long process which requires a lot of testing and is heavily connected to the car you are using, your driving style and the kind of event you want to race the car in.
Setting up camber and toe
Camber and toe have effects on the positions of your tires. Camber decides whether the top of your tires point towards or away from the car. Toe angle determines the same for the front of your tires.
Camber should be tuned by using the tire monitoring tool on the road. When driving through a corner, your camber value should be around zero degrees and negative on a straight. For example, if you notice your tires have negative camber in corners, go back to the tuning window and equate the difference by adding positive camber. The effect of toe is mostly negligible in Forza Horizon 4, but advanced tuners can use it to reduce oversteer and understeer to a small degree.
Anti-roll bars for more stability
Anti-roll bars grant extra stability in corners by balancing understeer versus oversteer. While each car has its own behavior which requires separate settings, there are some rules of thumb that apply to almost every vehicle.
First, the stiffer the rear anti-roll bar is compared to the front, the more oversteer you are going to face. Therefore, we advise you to set front stiffness only about 10 percent lower than the rear. Do not set the anti-roll bars too high or you could see some of your wheels in the air in some corners. Also, off-road setups usually require softer and tighter bars than street setups.
Adjust springs and ride height
Springs control how the weight is distributed under braking, acceleration, and cornering. Stiffer springs transfer more weight but tend to lose control under heavy load. Softer springs absorb bumps better but reduce the responsiveness of the car. Generally, it is a good idea to have the rear just a bit stiffer than the front to reduce oversteer. 800 lbs for the front and 900 lbs for the rear is usually a good place to start and improve the setup from there on.
In Forza Horizon 4, you can set your ride height almost fully to the minimum for street races, improving stability in corners. If you feel that your car is bottoming out too much while cornering, set it higher step by step. Off-roaders usually like to do the exact opposite and try to go for almost full ride-height.
Setting up aerodynamics
Lowering your front and rear wing is going to give your car more downforce in corners at the cost of top speed and acceleration. But in Forza Horizon 4, that loss of speed mostly is negligible, making a focus towards cornering an overall good choice.
If you feel sudden losses of grip even though you set your wings fully towards cornering, tune the front a bit down compared to the rear and try again.
Brake pressure and balance
The correct brake settings are a pivotal point of your car setup which needs to be suited to your driving style. By adding more pressure, your brakes are going to respond more sensitively to your input. Do not add too much, or your tires are going to lock up in every braking zone. For street racing, a value between 100 and 115 percent is good starter, with the brake balance staying centered.
If you like to go off-road, it is beneficial to shift the brake balance further to the front, somewhere between 55 and 60 percent. Also, tune down the pressure to somewhere around 85 percent in this case.
The differential rounds out your tune
Tuning the differential has significant effects on oversteer, understeer and your car’s ability to accelerate. The differential controls the difference in wheelspin between your left and right wheels. The more you lock the differential, the more your tires are being forced to rotate at the same speed. If you pick less than 100 percent, you send more power to the wheel getting more traction, depending on how unlocked the differential is. For front and rear tires, you can choose how much you want to lock the tires upon acceleration and deceleration.
In general, more acceleration lock allows you to have more power when exiting a corner. However, it also means you will have to deal with more understeer. The rear differential mostly is not as influential as the front. It shows that keeping the rear tires completely or mostly unlocked is a good way to get more traction.
The balance setting makes you choose how much power you want to transmit to the front or rear axle. Basically, it allows you to decide whether you want your car to be driven like a front or rear drive. In most cases, you want to send more power towards the rear, setting the bar somewhere between 70 and 90 percent. Too much rear power would lead to losses of traction and massive oversteer.
Conclusion
There is no unique guide to tuning and every driver is going to have different preferences. Therefore, you should not take everything in this guide at face value. Use our explanations and base settings as a starter. From there on, it is up to you to test and tune your vehicle. Only a setup adjusted specifically to you is going to get most out of your car.
What are your tuning tips for Forza Horizon 4? Tweet us your opinion at @overtake_gg!
