Have you been playing Forza Horizon 5 all week long? If so, you’d have heard of a little birdie called tuning and upon inspection might have noticed how in-depth it is. We got you fam! In this tuning guide, let’s take a look at how to tune your car in Forza Horizon 5 and upgrade it to the next level.
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How to Tune your Car & Upgrade it in Forza Horizon 5?
Just like past Forza entries (both Motorsport and Horizon), Forza Horizon 5 lets you tune your vehicle and truly make it yours. In the upgrades section of any car, you will find the tuning window. Go into it and you’ll see a vast array of changes that affect your car in every single facet. Microscopic details can make your car sound, feel and perform differently and Playground Games made sure to cover every single minutia.
The first thing you may notice is that a lot of these options will appear to be locked. That’s because you need the right part installed in your car so then you can fine-tune it. With the right parts equipped from the upgrades shop, you can hop in here and work on perfectly balancing them in harmony, to your liking. Just like in real life, car tuning in Forza Horizon 5 is a meticulous process that requires attention, patience, and knowledge. So, with the basics out of the way, let’s dive deeper.
Manual tuning
I am going to be honest with you. Tuning will require patience, time, and an understanding of how automobiles work. So, if you are not a car enthusiast or if you are new to all this, then I’d recommend you to take it slow and not go all-in immediately. When you are in the tuning menu’s you’ll see the following options, also the game tries to do its best to give you detailed descriptions of what each function does, so make sure to quickly read them before fully committing
Tires
Here you can control the air pressure on your front & rear tires. Higher pressure gives you more grip but the sudden loss of control while lower pressure will give you less grip but you won’t lose control of your car out of nowhere.
Gearing
This affects your top speed and acceleration. You’ll see multiple sliders based on how many gears your car has and each one of them can be adjusted to get the most out of every single gear and min-max the limitations.
Alignment
Alignment is all about the handling of your car and this menu has sub settings like”
- Camber
- Camber is the angle of your wheels relative to the ground. It can be how it normally is or you can make the wheels tilt inwards or outwards and this is not there just to make your car look cool, but, helps your tires cover as much surface area on the ground as possible which helps with cornering and turning.
- Toe
- Toe is your wheel’s horizontal angle and helps with things like under-steering and over-steering.
- Front Caster
- Finally, Front Caster is the angle of your steering axis. This right here, again, helps and compensates in turning and depending on the angle helps with understeering & oversteering.
Antiroll Bars
The body of your car swings in the direction you turn and antiroll bars, as the name suggests, helps your car from rolling over when turning. This connects the suspensions on both ends and makes your car stick more so you can happily adjust the understeer and oversteer settings.
Springs
Spring tuning comes with 2 sections of its own:
- Springs
- Springs help make your car more sturdy and help once again help with steering capabilities. Higher stiffness will make your steering feel more responsive with less grip and lower stiffness will do the opposite.
- Ride Height
- I am pretty sure this one needs no explanation. The lower/ close to the ground your car sits, the more aerodynamic it’ll be which will also help with your handling.
Damping
Multiple settings ahoy! Damping is tied to the suspension and helps you figure out how your car reacts to flat vs non-flat surfaces. The options available to you are-
- Rebound Stiffness
- Rebound means to bounce back right? And that’s what this does. After a jump or a bump, based on what your setting is, this pushes the car back to normal height as quickly or slowly based on your selection.
- Bump Stiffness
- While rebound controls you control the speed of your car pushing back, bump stiffness controls the compression speed. So basically, this will decide how slowly or quickly your car will go down instead of pushing up.
Aero
Aero aka Aerodynamics is, as we mentioned, helps you achieve higher speed and more control depending on how close to the ground your car is. The front and back downforce both focus on speed, handling, and responsiveness depending on the adjustments with the front end focusing on oversteer and the backend on understeer.
Brake
Not much here to say as this setting is simple for the braking power of your vehicle and we all know what higher and lower braking power are and what their pros and cons are.
Differential
Differential, for the uninitiated, is how power is distributed between the wheels of your car. Depending on if your car is front-wheel, rear-wheel, or all-wheel drive these settings will vary. So adjusting these settings will complement your car’s acceleration, deceleration, and overall power amongst the wheels of your car.
Phew, there’s been a lot to cover, hasn’t it? And I hope you developed some understanding of what each setting does and trust me, with time, you’ll master the craft of tuning. However, there’s another option available for peeps in a hurry.
Auto Tuning in Forza Horizon 5 – How to Auto Tune Cars
As we discussed, manual tuning helps you in changing everything about your car and truly makes it your own, auto-tuning is entirely the opposite of that in a way. Let’s say you don’t have the time to learn all the tuning stuff or perhaps you are uninterested in the nitty-gritty of it all and still want a fine-tuned vehicle. You won’t be penalized and will still get your wish.
Auto tuning lets you pick pre-set tune kits, made by the community and apply them to your car. If you see something you like? You can pick it up and it’s yours to keep! It even comes with a graph showing you the adjustments made to help you understand what you are getting into. Auto tuning is the equivalent of letting an expert do the job for you instead of getting your own hands dirty. There are hundreds and hundreds of presets available from the devs and the community alike and the numbers keep going up daily!
That’s all for this Forza Horizon 5 tuning guide. I hope you learned something, even if it is a little bit, about how to tune your cars from this article and if you did, how about you check out our other articles on FH5, here at GamerTweak.