FH5, Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio

A Tale of Two Games.

It took me a long time to make something of the Giulia Quadrifoglio in FH4. I wanted to like the car, but it wasn’t until I applied Modern Tuning™ that I had something drivable. With the introduction of Alfa Romeo in Horizon 5, the car was back. I was sort of hoping for the more recent model, but the 2017 one will do.

I started with an RWD build of the car, taking it into mid-S1 class. It’s understeery. It’s not excessively understeery, but I’m used to RWD builds having good turn-in. It suffers through sharp turns as well, being one of those cars where I have to slow down a lot, lift off, coast, straighten up, and get back on the power. Meanwhile, the drivatars are ploughing into such corners as if they’re nothing. More usually, the Giulia’s tail starts to wiggle because the drivatars don’t have to worry about coasting or racing in RWD cars on a keyboard, and coasting causes you to lose time.

I added aero, but that didn’t help as much as I hoped it would. The car slid through sharp corners and lost traction.

Right, I thought, time for AWD. The result was a bit more understeer, but not much more than my RWD build. I felt that the main issue was momentum. Even with slick tyres, upgraded brakes, and aero, the Giulia still didn’t take sharp corners all that well. Where I’d normally brake seemed to be a little too late. (See also my hypothesis below.)

This had me wondering whether I was mistaken about the car. This morning it was back to Horizon UK in my RWD Giulia Quadrifoglio, which was fine. It stuck to the road and did the Colossus without throwing up any issues. The AWD version (actually my FE Giulia) was definitely understeery and the shift in weight distribution to 52% also seemed to affect the handling, but not to the extent that it was sliding this way and that round corners.

I have a hypothesis that this is to do with the difference in drifting between FH4 and FH5. In FH4 drifting is a a massive pain in the arse. It took me over two years before I managed to three-star all of the drift zones. In FH5 I was three-starring the drift zones from Day 1. I assume that the roads in FH5 are uniform. A drift zone is merely marked out as such, but the surface interacts with cars in the same way that all other road surfaces do, or when you drift along ordinary roads or through speed zones, there seems to be no difference in how cars handle.

Tl;dr. I think the Giulia Quadrifoglio is undermined by the slidey physics of Horizon 5.