How to Make Cars Insanely Quick in Forza Horizon 5, Explained

Custom tuning is a great way to transform your stock cars into speed demons in Forza Horizon 5. While it can be a little daunting at first, understanding the basics of tuning allows you to pull the top speed out of every vehicle in your garage. So, in this article, we’ll explain how to tweak your car to break every speed limit possible. Let’s get straight into it. 

Adding Upgrades

Similar to Forza 4, there are two parts to upgrading your car in Forza Horizon 5. The first is upgrading the car’s components, and the second is fine-tuning it to perfection. So, before we get into the tuning section, let’s upgrade the engine, tires, and more to make the car capable of handling lethal speeds. 

To do this, hop into the car you want to upgrade and bring it to your house or the festival. From here, go to the Upgrades and Tuning section. Now, you’re ready to upgrade the components of your car. However, before starting, getting a blueprint of what you’re trying to achieve is always a good idea. So, head on to the “Find tuning setups” section and see what the highest horsepower the car is capable of achieving. Browse through the different setups and look at the Power section. By looking at it, you’ll get a feel for the maximum horsepower of the car. This will give us an idea of what to aim for. With that in mind, let’s start customizing. 

Custom Upgrades (Customize Individual Parts)

Now that we know what to aim for, this section will be our first step towards creating one of the fastest cars in the game. So, head on over to the Custom Upgrades section. Here you’ll find six parts to upgrade:

• Engine
• Brakes
• Drive Train
• Tires
• Aero and Appearance
• Conversions

We recommend starting with conversions as it’ll allow you to customize the engine of your choice later on. So, go to Conversions and follow along.

Conversions

As the name suggests, this section allows you to convert different parts of your car. And, it’s a crucial step towards achieving the top speed of any vehicle. Depending on your vehicle, you’ll see up to four sections here. However, out of them, these three are the most important in our case. 

• Engine Swap
• Drivetrain Swap
• Aspiration

For the engine swap, add the most powerful engine available. In some cases, like for the Supra, the most powerful engine is the stock one. However, in other cases, like the 2002 Koenigsegg CC8S, the most powerful one is the 5.1L V8 TT. Engines can vary from car to car, so find the one that provides the most power and add that. 

For the Drivetrain Swap, if your car is already an All-Wheel Drive (AWD), stick with it. However, if it’s not, we recommend swapping the Drivetrain to AWD as it can add an extra 1-2 mph in the final product and make the handling easier.

Finally, if you see an aspiration section, it means that turbo isn’t already included in your engine. So, go ahead and add a turbo through this section. (Disclaimer: for cars like the 2002 Koenigsegg CC8S, the aspiration section won’t be available as the turbo is already included in the engine.)

Aero And Appearance

This section allows you to customize the aerodynamics of your car, as well as make it look fancy. Here, you’ll find the following parts: 

• Front Bumper
• Rear Wing
• Rear Bumper
• Side Skirts
• Hood

For the front bumper, select one that unlocks downforce tuning for your car. This will be crucial as it’ll allow you to custom-tune your downforce later on. So, throw on any bumper that adds downforce tuning. 

Similarly, for the rear wing, add one that unlocks downforce tuning. 

All the other parts in this section cater to appearance, so feel free to throw on whatever you think looks good. 

Tires

Moving on, tires are crucial regardless of whichever build you’re going for. In our case, since we’re going for top speed, we want the best combination of handling and speed. So, here’s a step-by-step breakdown. 

• Tire Compound

For Tire Compound, you’ll want to equip race-spec tires as they provide the perfect blend of handling + speed. Look for the slick race tire compound or anything with race specs and add that. 

• Tire Width

When it comes to tire width, here’s a rule of thumb. The wider the tires, the better the handling. For both your front and rear tires, upgrade to the widest tires available as they’ll make the car much easier to handle. 

• Rim Style and Rim Size

We recommend leaving all of these unchanged as they don’t do much other than complicate the process. 

• Track Width

Since we’ve upgraded the size of our tires, the track width needs to match that. Upgrade both the front and rear track width to the max option. This will help with stability and make sure you have better handling at corners. 

Drive Train

Unlike Forza Horizon 4, this section allows you to upgrade your transmission up to a 10-speed. So, if you’re on a controller and can shift all the gears, play around with it and choose whatever transmission feels the best. However, if you’re playing with a wheel and a limited gearbox, select the option that aligns with your setup. 

Other than that, just add a race driveline and leave the differential unchanged.

Platform And Handling

For this section, we want to keep it as simple as possible.

• In the brakes section, add Race Brakes. 
• For Spring and Dampers, add Race spring and Dampers. 
• Add Race Anti-roll bars for both your front and rear. 
• Add Race Weight Reduction to make the car as light as possible

Engine

Finally, for the engine part, we’re gonna max out the engine specs. To do that, set all the parts in this section to Race Specifications.

• Race Intake
• Race Fuel System
• Race Ignition
• And so on. 

This covers our first step towards creating a speed demon. Now, let’s move towards the second part, custom-tuning the car. 

Custom Tuning

While custom-tuning can seem daunting at first, it’s not as scary as it looks. In fact, custom tuning your car is pretty easy if you know the basics, and it offers a ton of advantages. Let’s break all of it down and bump up the top speed of your car from decent to insane. 

• Firstly, from your menu, go to Custom Tuning. 

Here, you’ll see a lot of options ranging from tires to differential. However, to get the top speed out of the car, we just have to tweak a few. Additionally, at the bottom left, you’ll find the current top speed of your car. This will be your base point, and once you follow these tuning steps it’ll increase massively.

• Let’s start with the Tires. Change the tire pressure to 17.5 PSI for both your front and rear tires. 
• Next, switch over to Gearing. Here you’ll see all of your gears depending on whichever transmission you choose earlier. At the top, you’ll have the gear called “Final Drive.” Bring it down towards the lower end of the bar and match it with your final gear. So, if your final gear is 7, lower the Final Drive bar until it matches your final gear, and your top speed will increase.

This will amount to the majority of the difference, and you’ll notice that your top speed is already almost maxed out. However, to add some extra horsepower, do the following: 

• Leave Alignment, Antiroll Bars, Springs, and Damping unchanged. 
• Move to the Aero section. Here, since earlier we chose a front bumper and rear wing that unlocks downforce tuning, we can tune this section to our preference. So, for the front part, bring the bar to its lowest possible setting. This will add more downforce and increase your top speed. Additionally, you can alter the Rear section as well but we recommend leaving it unchanged. 
• For the brakes section, leave them unchanged. 
• Now, move to the differential section. Bring the front acceleration to 100% and the front deceleration to 0%. Similarly, bring the rear acceleration to 100% and the rear deceleration to 75%. 
• For balance, anywhere between 60-70% is the sweet spot. We recommend setting it to 65%.
• Finally, install this setup and your car is ready!

That’s about it, you can apply these principles to almost any car, and it’ll bring out its top speed. Additionally, if you custom-tune your car, you can alter the tuning before different races. This provides you with a pretty decent advantage as you can easily tweak the car’s performance to match the requirements of the race. That said, this tune is perfect for pulling the top speed out of any car and can help a ton with drag races, speed traps, and danger signs. So, install it and have fun!