In all honesty, there are dozens of different ways of tuning a drift car. It all comes down to personal preference. Even look at D1 or FD cars...they're all set up differently. I think it also comes down to skill level too. The tunes that a lot of the top drifters around here use are not really suitable for newcomers. Some of the advanced tunes can be very twitchy, hard to innitiate, and actually seem hard to drift...but in the right hands, the tune allows the driver to be very fast, quick with their movements, get massive angle, have to car be very stable mid drift, etc etc.
It would appear that I tune my cars quite differently than those that have posted so far. My general tune for most of my FR drift cars tends to look like this. This is for with CH tires.
Spring rate: stiffer than rear (7-11 range) / softer than front (4-8 range)
Ride height: lower than rear (slammed, sometimes up to 3 clicks above lowest) / higher than front by 2-4 clicks
Damper Extension: 2-5 range / 5-8 range
Damper compression: 2-5 range / 5-8 range
Antiroll bars: 1-3 / 2-5 (rear always stiffer than the front)
This type of setting makes the car a little more difficult to innitiate a drift with, but once you learn how to transfer the weight properly, the car is very stable through the drift. The soft rear springs causes the rear to squat, with more weight to be transferred to the outside rear tire, thus giving it more grip. This allows you to be on the throttle more though out the drift, which makes you faster. The lighter the car, the softer all the settings...heavier car I go with stiffer settings.
If you are using a DS3 controller, camber is mostly cosmetic. It can make a slight difference, but not much. To start, I would leave the camber at 0 and 0...maybe up to 1 in the front, but no more. Camber does make more of a difference if you use a wheel, as more camber tends to add a little more caster, which makes the steering wheel spin faster when going from lock to lock.
For toe, I tend to use about -0.05 to -0.07 in the front, and +0.02 to +0.05 in the rear...I just like the way that feels lol.
The diff makes a massive difference in drift performance. This is only my opinion, but for starting, I would use either 5/60/60 or 10/60/60 as your diff setting. Either of the two is the closest we can get to simulating a proper LSD. Experiement with the different diff settings to see how they change the cars behavior. Generally, if you start with 5/60/60, as you increase the initial setting (the one that's 5), and lower the Accel and Decel (the 60's), the car becomes more grippy, drifts faster, and gets less angle.
Two other things people forget about when tuning a drift car...downforce, and weight.
In real drifting, downforce isn't all that effective (as the airflow over the airfoil is not uniform and head-on), but in GT5, it makes a difference. If you find that you are getting too much wheel spin under full throttle, and you are spinning out a lot under full throttle, adding a wing to increase rear downforce can help elimate some of the unwanted wheel spin. Too much rear downforce can cause understeer (the front tires have less grip, and feel like they are pushing through the corner).
Another way to add grip to the rear end is by adding ballast. But Twitch, don't you want the car as light as possible??? In most cases yes, but sometimes adding the weight gives the rear more grip, which can enhance stability and increase speed. I always position the ballast at -50, and add whatever I think is necessary.
Cars that have a natural balance close even (50/50...cars like the M3s, RX-8, S2000...some exotics like the 599 are 48/52 or something like that) do not really need the ballast, as their rears tend to have enough grip as is. But cars that are closer to the 60/40 mark do often times benefit from the ballast. A prime example is the Tom's Chaser. It naturally has a 60/40 balance, and it is pretty impossible to drive, because the rear has no grip. Using ballast to change the balance to somewhere between 52/48 and 50/50 makes a huge difference in the cars performance.
EDIT: I have to agree with Maveric on this one. Raising the front height increases oversteer, raising the rear height increases understeer. Another way to think of it is raising the front increases grip at the front, raising the rear increases grip at the rear.
Another reason you raise the rear ride height in a drag car is so that when you launch the car, the rear end squats down. This causes more weight to be shifted to the rear of the car, which increases grip at the rear, and reduces wheel spin.
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