One of the Forza Horizon series' most oft-praised features is its remarkable depth. Each new game contains an even greater number of cars than the last, with every vehicle having its own set of upgrades and customisation options.
Related: Forza Horizon 5: How Experience And Progression Work
For those looking to really get the most out their cars, there's the deepest and most complex system of all - tuning. The tuning mechanics can often seem intimidating to newcomers - especially considering their rework for Horizon 5 - but once you get the hang of the basics, you'll be optimising your cars with ease. This guide will serve as an introduction to tuning, explaining what it does, what each part is for, and how to know what to tune.
The Absolute Basics Of Tuning
Tuning is the process of making small, incremental changes to parts of your car to improve its performance - mainly speed, power, and handling. The tuning menu contains nine different sub-menus, each with several sliders to make alterations. The aim of tuning is obviously to improve your car, but exactly what you tune will depend on what you want to acheive. If you want to improve handling, you'll be tuning different parts than you would be if you were trying to squeeze a bit more speed out of the car.
It's worth noting that some tuning sliders may be locked off if you haven't purchased certain upgrades - you'll see a notice when buying an upgrade in the garage if it unlocks new tuning options, so it's worth considering these to give yourself that extra bit of control. Another important note is that while this guide will move through the tuning menus in the order they appear, this is by no means the best way to tune - each category affects all the others, so doing one menu before another will have effects on the results of subsequent changes. Figure out an order that works for you based on your priorities, and don't be afraid to revisit menus during the process.
You also might be trying to solve a specific problem, like understeer or oversteer (FWD and AWD cars tend towards the latter, while RWD cars are the opposite), so it's good to know how to diagnose issues with respect to tuning. Knowing what each of the tuning sliders do will help you know what to change when faced with a problem like poor handling, so let's go through them.
Tire Tuning
There are just two sliders under tyres, controlling the amount of air in the front and rear tyres respectively. A higher PSI will put more of the tire in contact with the ground, giving you more grip and a more responsive feel, but the loss of grip will be more sudden. A lower PSI will feel a bit less easy to handle, but will heat up more gradually so you're less likely to experience sudden losses of control.
For racing, PSIs in the 25-35 range are good - just experiment with tweaking the values and find out what feels best for your car and driving style. Generally, having a higher PSI on the front tires is advised as it'll help when going into turns.
Gearing Tuning
Tuning gearing adjusts the gear ratios of your car's transmission, and its biggest effect is on speed and acceleration. The number of sliders will vary depending on the number of gears your car has (it's possible to buy transmissions with more gears in Horizon 5), but the key principles are the same.
The final drive slider adjusts everything at once, and then the rest of the sliders are for specific gears. The graph on the bottom right of the gearing screen is your best friend here, as it's a great asset to know how much of your car's potential you're using. The number furthest along the X-axis is the car's theoretical top speed, and if you've added a lot of power with upgrades, you'll probably notice that your topmost gear (the line furthest to the right) isn't getting close to it, even at max RPM (like the graph pictured).
Sliding final drive left towards speed is the simple fix for this, and as you move the slider left you'll see the lines on the graph move right, letting you squeeze every last mph out of your car. This will come at the cost of acceleration, so you might want to limit how much you move final drive (or even move it the other way) depending on your needs. You can also move individual gears' sliders for more specific changes; moving first and second to the left is a good way to maintain control early in acceleration, and moving them the other way is good for speeding up as fast as possible, like for a drag race.
Alignment Tuning
Alignment is an important one for a car's handling, and has three distinct subsections:
Camber
Camber is the angle of the wheels relative to the ground. Zero camber wheels will have the tyres exactly flat on the ground; negative camber will have the wheels lean inwards towards the car, and positive will have them lean outwards over the ground. The goal with camber is to keep as much of the tyre as possible in contact with the ground while cornering, so for track racing, negative camber is almost always the go-to.
Toe
This is the wheels' horizontal angle - toe in will have the front of the wheels pointing in towards the car, and toe out will have them pointing outwards. Any small changes to toe will have big effects, so make your changes very incrementally. Generally speaking, toe out brings responsiveness at the cost of leaning towards oversteer, while toe in brings stability with potential for understeer. Adjusting the front toe by just 0.1-0.3 is a good starting point, and you can tweak or add rear toe from there if needed.
Front Caster
The angle of your caster is the angle of the car's steering axis. Neutral caster is vertical, positive caster leans towards the back of the car, and negative caster leans towards the front. Higher caster allows you to put less into camber tuning, as it essentially creates additional camber of its own while cornering, while not affecting straight-line driving.
Antiroll Bars Tuning
Antiroll bars (ARBs) connect the left and right sides of your suspension, and their biggest effect is on over or understeer on the entry and mid of big corners. A softer ARB allows the car's body to roll over the wheel more, so lower front ARBs lean towards oversteer while lower rear ones lean towards understeer, and vice versa.
These are particularly important in front and all-wheel drive cars, and the effects of adjustments will be slight, so don't be afraid to make bigger changes. The same is not true for rear-wheel drive cars, so you don't have to push these sliders as much for one of those.
Springs Tuning
Like alignment, springs comes with distinct subsections to tune:
Springs
This affects the stiffness of your car's suspension, and is another major factor if a car over or understeers when cornering. Lighter cars, or ones that sit higher off the ground, won't require as stiff springs, so use your car's height and weight to get a ballpark for stiffness and adjust accordingly, tweaking as needed. Like ARBs, front and rear softness lean towards oversteer and understeer respectively, so that's worth keeping in mind.
Overall, stiffness' effect is similar to PSI - higher stiffness gives more responsiveness, but more sudden loss of grip; values on the softer end will hold traction better but feel a bit more sluggish to control.
Ride Height
As the name suggests, this controls how hight your car sits off the ground. The lower your car is, the lower its centre of gravity is, which means better aerodynamics and handling. However, leaving it a little bit higher can give you more flexibility for tuning springs, allowing you to get greater effects from less softness.
Damping Tuning
Another area with distinct subsections, damping is also concerned with suspension - particularly how it responds to non-flat road conditions.
Rebound Stiffness
This controls how quickly or slowly the spring extends after being pushed up - essentially, how quickly your wheels are pushed back to the ground after going over a bump, or how quickly your car is pushed back up to normal height after a drop. The values for this will depend entirely on what you use your car for, but stiff means a quicker extension and soft means slower. Softer suspension is better for off-roading, whereas harder works for track racing and drifting can potentially benefit from stiffer still.
Bump Stiffness
While rebound stiffness controls the speed of extension after compression, bump stiffness controls the speed of the compression itself. As with rebound stiffness, this can vary greatly depending on your use case, but it's important to note that you typically want bump stiffness to be less than rebound stiffness - setting the sliders somewhere around two thirds of the respective rebound slider is a good starting point.
Aero Tuning
Similar to how ride height affects control through the center of gravity, aero tuning uses aerodynamic downforce to push the car closer to the road and achieve a similar effect. This is really only relevant to higher-end cars due its reliance on speed (aerodynamics aren't exactly the primary concern of Ford when they're designing a Focus), so if you're racing in the lower classes, you can mostly ignore aero tuning.
Front and rear downforce increase downforce at the respective parts of the car, improving grip and handling, and as is the pattern, the front leans towards oversteer while the back leans towards understeer. Since downforce relies on air resistance, more of it will come at the cost of speed - while more downforce can greatly improve your cornering, top speed and acceleration will take big hits.
Brake Tuning
Brake balance affects how the car's overall braking force is divided between the front and rear brakes. Confusingly, moving the slider towards "front" will give you more power on the rear brakes, increasing stability with a lean towards understeer, while moving it towards "back" will have all the opposite effects.
Brake pressure controls your overall braking power and is more important if you're playing without ABS. Either way, this is very dependent on the driving conditions and your style, but you should only need very slight tweaks at most - play around with some minor changes and see what feels best for the situation.
Differential Tuning
Last but certainly not least, differentials control how power is distributed between the car's wheels. The number of options you have here will depend on the car - RWD cars will only have rear sliders (like the one pictured), FWD cars will only have front sliders, and AWD cars will have both, along with another slider to decide how power is split between the front and rear.
Perhaps the most complex part to wrap your head around, but essentially, the percentages decide how the power is split up based on how difficult it is to move a wheel. A wheel on asphalt will have greater friction and take more power to move than a wheel in mud, but obviously will have more traction. A differential set to zero percent would send all of the power to that wheel in the mud, resulting in nothing being sent to the wheel with traction.
However, you can't just set it to 100 percent (well, you can, but it's pointless), as this would permantly lock the differential, resulting in power always being distributed completely evenly, with your left and right wheels moving at the exact same rate, negating the differential's existence entirely. So where's the perfect balance? As with so many other parts of tuning, differentials are all about cornering.
The wider a path you take around a corner, the longer you'll travel. This is true of your wheels, so when you turn a corner, the wheels on the outside are covering more distance than the ones on the inside of the corner. The purpose of the differential is to account for this asymmetry, distributing the power in a way that accounts for the difference in work being done.
For a rear differential, a higher acceleration setting will lean towards oversteer, particularly on corner exit, though don't be afraid of higher numbers on a powerful car - anywhere from 40 percent to as high as the 90s can work. As you'd expect, front differentials are the opposite. You'll want to be in the opposite range (10-60 percent or so - go lower the faster the car is) and the lower you are, the higher the chance of understeer.
Deceleration tuning affects what the differential is doing when you're not on the accelerator, so is naturally a bit less important than acceleration. Don't neglect it, however - it is still important for cornering, particularly entry. You'll want this to be a lower value than your acceleration one, and how low just comes down to preference. The higher the value, the more the car is rotated on entry to the corner, so find what suits you and just be wary of oversteer.
Centre differential tuning is essentially a way to make an AWD car a bit more FWD or RWD. More power to the rear makes oversteer likelier; more power to the front makes oversteer likelier. For track racing, you'd typically want more power in the rear, so play around with values in the 60s and 70s to find what works best for your style and other tuning settings.
Tweaking the Tune
Tuning is something of an iterative process. Once you have a feel for your own style and how the car's default build handles, use the information set out above to create a tune you think might be good for you. From there, test it out and tweak as needed - don't be afraid to keep revisiting tuning until you've nailed the understeer/oversteer balance for perfect handling, or until you get the perfect mix of speed and acceleration to win that drag race.
Tuning's complexity can no doubt make it overwhelming, but armed with this guide, you should be able to create a tune that takes your car far beyond its stock power, and works far better your you personally than any tune you could download. Though daunting, it's a rewarding process, and by the end of it you'll have a car whose performance is more than worth the effort.
Next: Forza Horizon 5: Beginner's Guide And Tips
