Upgrades and Tuning

Whether you're bringing a Lotus Elan or a mighty TVR Cerbera Speed 12 to bear on your favorite track, delving into Forza 2'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 2 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 2, 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.

Upgrades

As in the Gran Turismo games, Forza 2 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.

Race weight reduction will usually be the most cost-effective upgrade you can make.

Upgrades are expensive, but most cars can be given a large (100-150 point) boost by purchasing a Race Weight Reduction package for them in the Platform and Handling section of the upgrades menu. Reducing the weight of a car won't usually affect its top speed, but it will make it quicker to accelerate, quicker to stop, and easier to handle, and usually at a relatively cheap price, too. That's usually going to be the first thing you want to buy for a car, but keep in mind that heavier cars are going to benefit from weight reduction a bit more than cars that are already pretty light. For instance, the heaviest car in the game, the Bentley Continental GT, will see its numerical rating go from B574 to A749 solely from a weight reduction upgrade (mostly due to the fact that its acceleration jumps from 4.4 to 6.0!) while the lightest, the Lotus Elan Sprint, will only go from D145 to D153 from a race weight reduction upgrade.

After the weight reduction, you'll want to bump yourself over to the engine upgrades and try to get the biggest acceleration gains that you can. Race cams and valves are good boosts for the money, but if you have cash to spare, you can throw all of your credits at the car and attempt to get the biggest bang for the buck that you can.

Tuning

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

Mo pressure, mo problems. Don't overdo it!

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.

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 2'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.