Short answer is the max speed expected on the track. Long, long answer below!

Theoretically, the car should reach red line speed in the top gear at the end of the fastest straight you are going to run on. At most tracks you never have a long enough straight in which you could reach the ultimate top speed of the car. What you want instead is to set the gearing so that the car tops out in top gear just as you start to brake for the next corner. However, unless you are going to make a set up for every track, or at least groups of tracks, what I do is to gear the car so that it reaches it’s highest speed in six gear fairly quickly; in other words I’m favoring accelerating through through the gears rather than getting the ultimate top speed.

For me this is a two step process. I tune (but not gear) per ForzaTune 4. This includes adding a six speed transmission. Then I benchmark the car. Usually this give me the ultimate top speed of the total package of the car. If I think I’m being limited by gearing I alter the final drive ratio to give me more speed. Eventually I have a top speed value, but this speed is reached asymptotically; in other words the last few mph (or kph) take much longer to achieve than the ones before.

That’s step two. By experience and guessing, I estimate a lower top speed that I could get to a lot quicker. For instance, right now I’m tuning an Alfa Romeo GTA to E275. After upgrades and tuning (but NOT) gearing, running Benchmark shows my top speed as 134mph. When I enter my data into the gearing portion of FT4 I decided to move the slider to about 120mph and using the resultant data from FT4, I set the gearing, then benchmark again. The result is a new top speed of 123mph, which is close enough. I’m giving up 11mph top speed to be able to get through the gears quicker.

And Geministorm, thanks for those suggestion on the stability settings. I’ll be giving those a try.

Review: For F-RWD cars, I find the ARB a little ‘hard’ in this iteration of Forzatune, and even at 105% understeer I still get a good bit of OS exiting corners (especially) and it can be pretty squirrelly on some of the entrances too (feels very jittery). However, with M-RWD cars, ~105% US puts them on ‘rails’ and I can spend more time concentrating on the correct line instead of worrying about keeping control of the car. The few AWD cars I’ve driven have performed well, although not as responsive, even sluggish, as I’d like at 105% OS, maybe I should try a little more OS and see if that doesn’t fix the situation.

Update on review: I started setting the F-RWD cars on about 110% to 115% (depending on results) and found that my results improved significantly. Note that I drive with a MS wireless wheel and here are my base settings for setup;

F-RWD: 110% to 115%
M-RWD: 102% to 105% (drives on ‘rails’)
R-RWD: 100%
F-AWD: 90% (you want to produce a minute amount of OS to get the best steering responsiveness)
F-FWD: 100%

Question: For Max Speed, should we be entering the max speed expected on that course, or taking the value from the Benchmark determination? I was of the mind that it should be track-tuned to the max on that track (for example, Tsukuba vs. LeMans should give different values) but another tuner thought it should be the Benchmark value. So, which of is right?

Feature request: Allow data entry for the Max Speed instead of the slider in the Gearing area, touch screens are too inaccurate to get the right number for my tastes.

Review: For F-RWD cars, I find the ARB a little ‘hard’ in this iteration of Forzatune, and even at 105% understeer I still get a good bit of OS exiting corners (especially) and it can be pretty squirrelly on some of the entrances too (feels very jittery & loose). However, with M-RWD cars, ~105% US puts them on ‘rails’ and I can spend more time concentrating on the correct line instead of worrying about keeping control of the car. The few AWD cars I’ve driven have performed well, although not as responsive, even sluggish, as I’d like at 105% OS, maybe I should try a little more OS and see if that doesn’t fix the situation.

Question: For Max Speed, should we be entering the max speed expected on that course, or taking the value from the Benchmark determination? I was of the mind that it should be track-tuned to the max on that track (for example, Tsukuba vs. LeMans should give different values) but another tuner thought it should be the Benchmark value. So, which of is right?

I’d be happy to provide information on the cars I have tuned with the app, typically I’m getting into the top 1% on the leaderboards, and any help to push me up further would be appreciated!

Tag: superseded

There are 2 parts of the tune I don’t follow. The ARB and Differential. I mainly drive RWD cars and the rear ARB setting feels too high and always makes the rear end slide too easily so I usually cut it in half.

The differential settings also feel a little too high and cause the rear end to slide too much in both throttle on and off conditions. I usually set the diff to 45 accel/15 decel and get much better results.

I would ask that we include a data entry keyboard input for the Estimated Top Speed instead of the slider. The slider is too touchy and hard to put on just the right number. Thanks!