While the wonderful Forza Horizon 5 is a game that leans into arcade-style racing, as opposed to a full-on racing sim, that doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy the fun of working on your cars to maximize performance. The custom tuning options in Forza allow you to adjust the way your car outputs power as well as responds to your inputted commands. This can be a crucial skill for performing at your best on the streets and trails of Mexico. If you’re new to tuning, this guide will help you understand the basics you need to get started.
Why Is Tuning Important In Forza Horizon 5
Learning how to tune your cars in Forza Horizon 5 is an extremely handy skill to refine. In general, using tuning options helps you tweak performance to make cars faster and more controllable to turn them into as efficient machines as possible for your needs, whether you’re trying to craft a nimble street racer, powerful dragster, or drifty off-roader.
While new players can get a start by downloading pre-made tuning configurations created by other players, if you want to get the most out of your cars it’s important to learn how to tune for yourself, too. While a pre-made tuning option may provide a good base for your customization, only by learning how to tune your vehicles can you begin refining their performance not to meet some generic “best” standard, but instead to make them the best possible cars for you.
How To Tune A Car In Forza Horizon 5
If you’re new to tuning, it can be overwhelming to look at all the options available while not understanding exactly how they all affect your car and its performance, let alone how they interact with each other. Here’s what you need to know and what to change to get your cars set up the way you need to show your best on the roads.
1) Get Your Upgrades
One important thing to understand about your cars is that not every customization and tuning option will be available to you by default. When purchasing a new car with stock parts there is a good chance that one or more components required for tuning will not be present, as evidenced by a yellow text block indicating what part is not installed.
The good news is that all you need to do to unlock your full tuning capabilities is to purchase the parts and upgrades. When browsing the upgrades screen, any upgrades that offer tuning capabilities will include a note showing exactly what they unlock so you can quickly swing through the shop and get all the parts you need to get to work making your car your own.
2) Do the Basics
While the best tuning comes from refinement, you need to have somewhere to start. The easiest way to do so is to simply download a popular tuning configuration for the car you’re ready to work on. If you prefer making all the adjustments on your own, however, the route forward is to do your basic tuning pass. This is where you apply fundamentals across the different tuning pages to get a setup that improves on the default and brings you closer to peak performance so that you can more easily refine and find your ideal settings.
Tires
The inflation level on your tires is a trade-off between performance and forgiveness. Higher PSI settings make your tires more capable, often increasing the maximum grip you can achieve with a trade-off that loss of grip can be more catastrophic, leading to dangerous turns and loss of control. Lower PSI will decrease the grip capabilities of your tires but make loss of grip a more gradual effect for a more forgiving driving experience. For a basic set-up, I like to set PSI to the low 30s with a little more pressure in the front, knowing I will likely lower the PSI later as needed during fine-tuning.
Alignment
If you’ve ever seen a tricked-out car in real life there’s a decent chance you saw tires that seemed to be aligned on a tilt. This is known as the camber of the tires, with a negative camber meaning the top of the tires lean in while a positive camber sees the top of the tires leaning out. When first learning to tune cars I was taught to drop camber a couple of ticks from default due to the game tending to err on over-applying camber. This sets a basic improvement you can further refine later. Your car’s tow angle can be used to adjust your steering with an outward angle raising understeer, while the front caster serves as an added camber in turns that are not present on straights.
Antiroll Bars
Your car’s antiroll bars are another way to tailor how your car delivers control in corners, with an increase to your front creating more understeer and an increase to the rear creating more oversteer. For initial settings on an all-wheel drive car, you can lower your front and raise your back sliders to create a more responsive feel, however, for a rear wheel drive car, you can leave your sliders as they stand for this initial quick tuning.
Springs & Ride Height
The spring tension on your car determines how much it moves up and down when driving and landing. As with other elements your springs can have an impact on steering, with stiffer front springs lowering your oversteer while stiffer rear springs decrease understeer. Your ride height impacts your car’s speed and control. As a basic setting, I like to set my car to ride low with the understanding I may need to increase height if experiencing issues with bottoming out, particularly for cars you expect to be doing a lot of big jumps and offroading in where bottom outs are more of a danger, as doing so can greatly reduce your speed.
Damping
Your car’s damping allows you to adjust the control of your car by changing how easily its springs compress and expand through impacts. For my first pass with a basic tune, I learned to adjust the stiffness down to about 65% of the corresponding values for rebound stiffness. This sets a baseline you can later adjust during fine-tuning by either softening the springs on the end of the car struggling for grip or hardening the springs on the end maintaining too much grip.
Aero
Your car’s aero setup allows you to play with a trade-off of grip through corners versus straight-line top speed. The more downforce you put into your car the more grip it will have as it is pressed down into the ground harder as you drive. Conversely, added downforce also means added resistance, so higher aero levels also lower your top speed. In general, your rear cornering increases will provide more grip however if you suddenly find you are struggling with understeer it may mean you got too high relative to your front grip, preventing your front end from properly turning around corners.
Brake
Braking can be the most confusing tuning element due to a non-intuitive UI. Sliding braking toward the front increases rear braking to make for a more controlled drive at the risk of understeer issues, while sliding toward the rear makes your front more responsive at the risk of oversteering. For initial tuning, I prefer to leave brakes as is until getting out on the roads and seeing how the car handles.
Differential
Your car’s differential determines how biased it is toward driving power to the tires through the path of least resistance. Increasing your differential increases bias toward the wheels facing the most resistance, allowing you to gain more grip. As a quick tune-up, I prefer setting rear differential with the 75/25 rule, while the front differential can be much lower, with acceleration around 20% and deceleration at most just a few ticks above zero.
Gearing
If you find that your car doesn’t seem to be hitting its max capabilities then gearing is a crucial adjustment. For a simple initial tune, simply adjust the main slider until your final gear extends out to the maximum speed of your vehicle. This ensures you’re not leaving any miles per hour on the table before moving on to fine-tuning where you can later sacrifice them for power at lower levels if desired. Later during fine-tuning, you can aim to set your gears to maximize time at peak performance, near the start of your redline, without bouncing off the limiter too frequently.
3) Test Your Ride
As noted, there is no one-shot magic tuning setting, so some of the defaults may help your ride, and others may ultimately need significant tweaking. While the initial settings should help lower your times it’s now time for the real fun: testing your vehicle out. This can also be a good time to get acquainted with the Telemetry overlay, available in the “Advanced Controls” section under “SWITCH ANN / TELEMETRY / TTS”.
While your telemetry data is not mandatory when fine-tuning, it can help provide useful data for identifying the why behind any problems you feel in your car. In the above screenshot, I can see my Viper is not getting sufficient heat into the tires, and can aim to adjust that in fine-tuning.
The most important step is simply pushing your car onto the streets and seeing what you like and don’t like about it by checking out the different locations and terrains on the map. By identifying your strengths and weaknesses in the current configuration, you can determine what needs tweaking in the shop and take that to the sliders.
4) Fine Tune
The way you drive your cars is also a critical component in fine-tuning your vehicles to ensure they help you get your times as low as possible and scores as high as possible by carefully crafting the perfect set-up for you. You aren’t likely to nail your settings on the first go. Instead, you should expect to gradually improve your car’s handling until it’s just right. With my Viper, I ended up lowering the PSI on the tires and increasing the front caster in addition to other smaller tweaks, ultimately shaving another 4% off the already improved time I was able to put in on the same course with the basic quick tune.
The best way to fine-tune the setup for a particular car is to get out there and get driving. Whether you’re taking part in races and events or simply going for a cruise, you’ll soon get a feel for what is working well and what could still use work. By making small adjustments and then giving your new setup a runout, you can gradually refine the tuning on your car until you find that Goldilocks zone for all your settings to get it operating at its peak. You’ll have your ride dialed in to perfection before you know it.
With this guide in your back pocket, you now understand the fundamentals of how tuning for cars in Forza Horizon 5 works and are ready to get to work on your own cars. The best way to see how changes affect your driving is to try them yourself. Stop losing performance to the default settings and get yourself under the virtual hood!
Published: Feb 25, 2025 6:35 PM UTC