Tuning

Whether you're bringing a Ford Focus or a mighty TVR Cerbera Speed 12 to bear on your favorite track, delving into Forza's tuning options will let you get a bit more bang for your buck. This section of the guide is intended to give you a very, very basic overview of the tuning commands in Forza Motorsport. It'll only be a matter of time before there are FAQs detailing tweaks and tuning tips for the most popular cars in Forza, but for now, you're going to have to adjust and tune your cars yourself. We're not going to delve into specific recommendations here, just tell you basically what the settings do and how they'll affect your car.

As in the Gran Turismo games, Forza will allow you to both buy upgrades to your cars and tweak their settings manually. (Manually tuning car settings will indeed usually require you to have purchased some upgrades first.) If you're intimidated by the tuning screen's complexity, then, well, don't worry about it; just buy the upgrades that you can and leave the tuning options on default. Upgrades alone will work to increase the raw power and stats of a car, so if you're just looking for something "better," just take it to the shop and buy whatever parts you can afford for it. Tuning can get you closer to a car that handles the way you like it, but it's also somewhat easy to screw things up if you don't know what you're doing. (You can always revert to the initial settings for your car, though, in case you happen to, say, entirely cut out the brakes.)

Tires

The main tire setting is pressure. You can increase the pressure here if you want more control in turns, but you overdoing this will result in more sudden slips when the tires suddenly lose their grip. Less pressure will increase grip by allowing more of the tire to contact the road, but the side effect of this is that you'll take slightly longer to turn off the forward axis.

Gearing

Properly tuning gearing ratios is one of the black arts of car adjustment; it can be difficult to adjust these properly unless you really know what you're doing, especially if you're adjusting the ratios individually, but well-tuned gear ratios can greatly increase your ability to succeed on a given course.

Tweaking your gears is a twitchy business, but can result in slightly better acceleration and top speed if you know what you're doing.

Higher ratios here (i.e. moving the sliders to the right) will increase your acceleration, while lower ratios (moving the sliders to the left) will increase overall speed. Luckily, with Forza's built-in benchmarking utility, you can quickly get feedback on the efficacy of your ministrations and correct any mistakes you might be making before you get too out of hand. In our experience, most cars can get a bit more top speed by individually adjusting the top gear, but it will take you longer to reach said top speed, so you'll only want to perform such tuning when dealing with a course with fairly long straights.

You can also attempt to twiddle with the lower gears and tighten up the ratios there for better acceleration on courses with lots of sharp turns, but in our experience, the preset settings were usually suitable for most situations.

Alignment

Camber
Camber affects how your car's wheels are tilted towards each other. A zero-degree camber means that the wheels are perfectly aligned when resting on a flat surface; negative camber will tilt the tops of the wheels inward; and positive camber will tilt the tops of the wheels outward from the body of the car. Increasing negative camber will reduce understeer, while reducing negative camber will reduce oversteer. You can adjust this individually for each axis, so if you find your rear wheels slipping on corners (we're looking at you, Tom's Z382 Soarer), you may want to try adjusting the rear axis by itself to see if you can't correct this.

Toe
Toe is similar to camber, but along a different axis. A negative degree of toe will result in "toe-in," where the fronts of your wheels will be closer together than the rear, while a positive degree of toe will result in "toe-out," where the fronts of the wheels will be farther apart than the rest of the wheel. For the front axle, toe-in will increase your turning ability but hurt your overall stability, while the situation is reversed with toe-out. Any kind of severe toe will decrease your tire lifetimes, meaning that you probably don't want to fool around with these settings too much if you're going out on an endurance race.

Caster
Caster affects the tilt of the steering pivot relative to the vertical axis. Only positive caster angles seem to be possible in Forza, meaning that the top pivot of the axis will be further towards the rear of the car than the pivot that actually connects to the wheel. A positive caster will increase the amount of camber that wheels are affected with while turning, allowing you to run with lower inherent camber numbers. On heavier vehicles, though, lower caster angles can increase responsiveness while turning, so you'll need to fine tune this in conjunction with your camber for maximum responsiveness in turns.