FH4 & 5, Same diff
When I got FH4, I looked at the tuning settings and didn’t bother because they were incomprehensible. My first attempt at tuning was stretching out the final drive after seeing the YouTuber, DUBS, do the same.
The next major step came from watching a Shmee150 video in which Tim Burton talked about changing the car setting to corsa (or something like that) and the effect it had on the springs. I started doing the same with generic settings for the springs. I did some wild guessing with the settings for the ARBs, but the game is so forgiving that it didn’t seem to mind.
Things got a little more serious when I ran into weight-based settings in a YouTube video. I know these get dismissed, but they had two advantages in my tiny, non-technical mind: first, they made sense, and second, they could be calculated exactly. There was no need use generic spring settings any longer, although as I said above, the game is quite forgiving.
I also wondered about tyre pressures and adopted my GT3, GT4, rally and off-road settings from real life because Horizon 5 is so sim. Actually, the tyres in the game are overinflated, although this doesn’t seem to matter too much, and reducing the pressures doesn’t seem to matter, either.
The diff still ended up with generic settings which I picked out at random. In Horizon 4, I went for 22/5 at the front (yes, we’re talking about an AWD drivetrain) and 65/16 at the rear because the centre balance of most cars in the game is 65%. In Horizon 5 this became 20/5 at the front and 60/15 at the rear. The maths of it should be obvious.
I was watching the FailRace crew doing some madcap downhill racing in beamng (or was it their races against the flood mod; it may have been both). They were using the PWR (power-to-weight ratio) to build the cars, upping it slightly each time.
That got me thinking about how you might use the PWR in Horizon 4 and 5. After some experimenting, I realised that this didn’t affect tyres, gears, ARBs, springs, damping, aero and brakes. Well, not directly. That left the diff which is the power distribution system.
The choice I had, the focus of most of my testing, was hp-to-kg or kW-to-kg. The game has PS, but that’s only marginally different from hp. (Side note: if you use pounds, divide the weight by two; or better still, join the 21st century and use kilograms.) It’s interesting to try both ratios, but hp-to-kg may have a slight edge because the front-rear difference is often less extreme. For example, my BMW M2 has an hp-to-kg ratio of 0.452/0.548, but the kW-to-kg ratio is 0.337/0.663. The impression I get is that the former improves the handling of the car because there’s less of a difference between the two figures, which are often close to the weight distribution. (Side note: I multiply the PWR figures by ten, thus making them percentages.)
This doesn’t result in any difference in speed, which remains the same, and testing is a little inconclusive because I usually do one race with the kW-to-kg settings and repeat the race with the hp-to-kg settings. The second race often ends with a slightly faster time, which might be because I’m pushing the car a little harder, and may be because the handling is a bit better. Often the times are not that different. After doing Descansar Dorado three times in the 2015 Cayman GTS using different diff settings, the overall time difference was a bit over four-tenths.
My test tracks are typically the Colossus in FH4 because of the mix of technical stuff and straights, and Descansar Dorado, Dunas Blancas and Copper Canyon in Horizon 5. I should probably do rivals round the circuits or set up solo timed races (clearly labelled) to perhaps get a more consistent picture.
It’s been interesting doing this with a variety of cars and with a variety of settings, including switching the front and rear values for front-engined cars, although whether this makes a difference is another matter. It does allow me to continue the pretence that I have the faintest idea what I’m doing.
Appendix (7th June 2023)
I turned my attention to Lamborghinis this morning and was reminded of HALB 10 cars. I don’t know whether this term is in common parlance, but it’s a car that has 10 for Handling, Acceleration, Launch and Braking. All my tinkering above probably makes little real difference to the overall performance of such cars.
I also tried to make a solo, timed circuit (Mulegé), but is seems FH5 won’t let you do that. I did create such a map, but it declared me the winner micro-seconds after starting the race, and I had to set it to ten laps instead. I did the event in the BMW M2 using metric and imperial diff settings. The time difference was two-tenths of a second.
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