FH5, Tuning into the future

And some other stuff.

The details of series 21 are out. Yeah, off-roading. Shrug. Some new pick-up trucks (cue baffling fanboy hysteria about them; Quote from Facebook: “This month is Huge!”). Two repeat exclusives, an Extreme E and the terrible Morris Traveller. There are other, thematically relevant exclusives which could’ve been included as seasonal rewards, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

There’s an update to photo mode (don’t care), but what about an update to the painting tools?

And looking ahead to series 22, more new rims (which we don’t need), but no sign of tunable stock aero or different, tunable rear wings. Even NFS: Most Wanted (2005) had more wings than the Horizon series even if they were purely cosmetic.

I’ve driven the Porsche Mission R. The problem with EVs is a lack of gears. Most of the time I played FH4 it was in automatic, hence I didn’t need to pay any attention to gears. But now that I use manual with clutch, it’s all about the gears. I know what gear I need to be in for a corner, and if I’m not using gears, I’m a bit lost because speed is no longer my concern. And therefore, the Mission R is a difficult car for me to drive effectively because every corner is a plethora of questions: Too fast? Braked too soon? Didn’t brake soon enough?

I’ve spent quite a lot of time back in FH4 because I’ve been spending a lot of time trying some different diff tunings. Let’s get the drivetrain out of the way. As I’m on a keyboard, AWD is the way to go. I occasionally try RWD and appreciate the turn-in, but without effective throttle control, corners are a nightmare. It took me ages to get the Regera round the Goliath in FH4 because on many attempts when the car seemed to be behaving itself, it’d lose traction and spin at odd moments.

I was wondering what to do with power-to-weight ratios (PWRs) and settled on the diff. For a long time, my road racing settings have been 20/5 to the front and 60/15 (22/5 and 65/16 in FH4) to the rear. I based these on stock settings, but the pattern (while obvious) was just arbitrary.

When it comes to measuring the PWR, it’s either kW to kg (FH4) or hp to kg (FH5). I tried with purely imperial measures, but the pound is too small a measure to produce effective figures. Also, hp to kg isn’t so odd because 1 PS is about 0.98 of 1 hp.

And so I embarked on the Colossus many times over in FH4. It’s a decent length race and a good mix of straights and tight turns.

I also tried the figures in various combinations, but found that whatever numbers I was using, they seemed to work best when I followed the weight distribution rather than applying the higher settings to the rear wheels. My 2013 BMW M6 (to give a random example) had a PWR of 0.289, giving figures (with rounding) of 29/7 and 71/18. The interesting one was the Acura NSX in FH5 which had PWR figures that nearly matched the weight distribution. While the new diff settings don’t entirely eliminate understeer, the NSX was taking corners with far greater ease than I was expecting.

So, if you’re playing FH4 and 5 on a keyboard, this might actually be beneficial for handling. One question remains: what about cars that have a PWR around 1 or higher (e.g. the Ultima)? My answer would be to try weight distribution instead, but this is all about tinkering and having some fun. Also, it gets me interested in both games because I have a reason to play them beyond doing the daily.

My experiments also revealed something else. I sometimes adjusted the final drive of the cars to see what speed I could squeeze out of them. On one BMW the gears got stretched out to the right, but on another, they got shifted to the left. There was another car (sorry for the vagueness) where the gears got so far to the right that I set the top gear to the edge of the graph or, I felt, the car would lumber.