Request: ATTN all car tuners.

[BulkZerker]

Please, please tune your cars using Racing hard tires.

I've ran a few tunes, I'm not gonna point fingers here so no one looses any face purely because almost all of you tuners have more tuning talent in your little toe than I have in my overly beer battered brain.

My Reasonign for this is the lesser tires will show you what needs to be adjusted more readily and predictably than the Soft Slicks purely because its' easier to make them break loose and hey do so much more predictably than the soft tires. Also it makes the tunes more versatile. Nothing's more dissapointing than seeing a car setup absolutely fall to pieces because you entered an enduro and put on a harder compound tire.

The soft compound tire also hides faults in tunes that harder ones will reveal. It's like trying to sculpt with only a sledgehammer.

Please take this in mind on your future setups peeps.

 

[budious]

A few of us already do, I generally start my tuning on tires one or two grades where I intend to spec the final car. Typically I tune target for Sport Soft or Race Hard, so I might start Comfort Soft to Sport Soft depending on car. If I provide a Race Spec for my car, it's usually nothing more than add Race Softs and a tweak or two to drivetrain to accommodate those who complain I didn't tune it for Race Soft... hard to make everyone happy.

 

[Greycap]

Also it makes the tunes more versatile. Nothing's more dissapointing than seeing a car setup absolutely fall to pieces because you entered an enduro and put on a harder compound tire.

The soft compound tire also hides faults in tunes that harder ones will reveal. It's like trying to sculpt with only a sledgehammer.

You may have not have witnessed it yourself but the same works in the other direction too, even more dramatically so. If a car isn't quite fast enough on Racing Hards and the driver decides to throw some Racing Softs on the balance can go from safely understeering to wildly oversteering or vice versa as one end gains more grip than the other due to how the car is setup.

I disagree with the soft compound hiding anything, it simply creates different handling characteristics and requires different settings. Naturally there are those who slap Racing Softs on and call it a day without even thinking of fine tuning because there's enough grip now but when the tuner takes the time to extract every possible tenth from the soft tyres they're not hiding a thing anymore because their limits have been discovered - those limits are just different from those of harder compounds. Ask any knowledgeable tuner and they'll tell you that a good setup on soft tyres still beats a bad setup on those same soft tyres because it extracts more out of them.

 

[gemini-erau]

i agree with grey, i have found numerous tunes, (as well as made my own) for various tire assortments, and when something tuned on softs is used with hards, it breaks loose. many tuned for hards and then moved to softs, are too tight and i have found most of my cars then understeer like no other.

i have found that most of the tunes i find online are more just a good starting point, and then i can fine tune it to my driving style and tire choice with only adjusting a few parameters... such as dampers only, or dampers and camber, etc.

 

[Corthalis]

The major problem is still the offline vs online tunes. I'm positive 90% of the tuners tune offline and a lot of them like to use sports soft max to keep it to their "street cars" rules. Most of these cars (especially the ones leaning on the higher end of power and/or weight spectrum) just don't drive well at all with sports soft online where there's a lot less grip. I could care less about beating AI as there's no need for properly tuned cars for that.

 

[veyron1001]

if hard and medium grade tires lasted longer than soft, I would use them

 

[budious]

... Most of these cars (especially the ones leaning on the higher end of power and/or weight spectrum) just don't drive well at all with sports soft online where there's a lot less grip...

I would agree to the extent that people try to slam and use sports tires offline. If you setup the cars to normal ride height so there is more weight transfer then more load is applied downward onto the cornering tire and thus, you have more grip. Namely, this is one of the reasons I tune at normal ride height.

 

[mafia_boy]

To the OP, sorry dude, you're on your own on this one for a couple of reasons.

1. All the tuners who have migrated from GT4 will generally tune a car using Sport Soft tyres and only if the car is very extreme, will tune with either Hard or Medium Racing tyres. MFT has done this quite often and I personally will tune with Sports Soft then upgrade to racing rubber for extra traction if a competition requires it (such as the GT4 Tuning Car Challenge).

2. People online more often than not will race with Racing Softs and if you put out a car on the circuit with inferior tyres, you will more than likely be destroyed by the other cars that are on the circuit. Your suspension & gearing might be better but even that will not save you if the opponents are running ridiculously better rubber than you.

It's not like we want to stick with racing softs but to remain competitive in online races and to satisfy the requests and requirements of the customers, we're pretty much forced to go with them.

 

[budious]

I thought that was what he was asking, tune to Race Hard over Race Soft... and you do just that or on a lower tire grade such as Sport Soft?

 

[mafia_boy]

I thought that was what he was asking, tune to Race Hard over Race Soft... and you do just that or on a lower tire grade such as Sport Soft?

We do but as I said, because of what happens online (ie. everyone uses Race Softs), it makes it harder to tune it our way over what the customer's want/need. It sucks personally because I started off tuning on Sport Soft's, taking them online and getting my ass handed to me race after race because all my opponents were using Race Softs unless we were at a track with tyre restrictions. So it becomes a case of "can't beat them, join them" but with our expertise and experience, we can produce cars on Race Softs that make the average user just over how good they can be.

For me personally, one drag car I tuned recently for a customer (R34 Nur II, customer had traction issues pre-tuning) had him just singing my praises since he took delivery and is now whipping pretty much anything up to 850hp down the TGTT.....I even beat an 800hp+ Trans Cammer Mustang (which had Racing Softs) using Comfort tyres down Suzuka's pit straight during initial testing and the opponent said it was the first time his Mustang had been beaten by a Skyline!!

Rotary Junkie can attest to this, as I was testing the car later on against some of his more high powered rides in drag and top speed at SSR7 before I sent the car to the customer. 👍