Three Hundred Miles Per Hour

[Lizzie97]

Ok, I have an official World Record that just places the PAL version over the NTSC without going backwards. I still think that it is possible to break the 400 mph line as I-Runner did in the NTSC version with Toyota GT-One by going backwards.

I also need to thank mcsqueegy for believing in me all the time!
After all I am pretty happy for ressurrecting this thread! Enjoy!

 

[ZedNinetySix]

Ok, I have an official World Record that just places the PAL version over the NTSC without going backwards. I still think that it is possible to break the 400 mph line as I-Runner did in the NTSC version with Toyota GT-One by going backwards.

I also need to thank mcsqueegy for believing in me all the time!
After all I am pretty happy for ressurrecting this thread! Enjoy!

So damn close to 400! Making the history books is getting ever closer!

EDIT: Woahw, what a goldmine this thread is!
It's like a time-capsule...

So I hear the OP is not active anymore since over a decade, I guess its our civic duty to maintain this niche piece of history ourselves.

 

[TeaKanji]

I was doing research and trying to understand how people in this thread were managing to get such high speeds, but the info is scattered all over the place. On top of that, the people on the leaderboard rarely shared their tunes publicly, forcing everyone to go through trial and error to find the 'right' tune. So, for anyone interested in reaching these crazy 320mph+ speeds, here's a bullet-point summary so you don't need to sift through the thread:

• On PAL, because the game runs at 50 FPS and has less physics calculations, you can set up your car's suspension in such a way that it stutters around Test Course's bends and builds up speed extremely quickly. You can see this in Lizzie's run above me; notice how the car's acceleration rises sharply around the bend. The stutter doesn't seem to happen on NTSC versions from my testing (EDIT: seems like it does work, it's just car-dependent: see mcsqueegy's post below me). So, basically, you need to use PAL to stand a chance of beating these records.
• The stutter appears to be caused by an imbalance of front and rear grip, along with a bouncy suspension setup. The key settings are a stiff front damper bound and soft rebound, max front camber, max toe-out, very low front downforce and very high rear downforce. Soft springs also seem to help. You want the rear wheels to have as much traction as possible, but you also want to make sure the car doesn't understeer too much exiting the bend. I've seen mentions of placing a ~ 200kg ballast on the car, presumably at the back. I thought that you needed to run super hards on front and super softs on rear so the front tyres lose grip more easily, but Lizzie managed to make it work with super softs on both sides.
• Gear setup kind of matters, but it doesn't seem like you need to think too much about it. Most people just set Auto to 25 and adjusted the final gear and individual gears afterwards. You could probably minimax it using the gear trick, but you can make it work with wider gears as long as you're not gearing up to 5th or 6th too early. Gearing up can stabilise the car and cancel the stutter.
• For the fastest runs possible, you need to keep the stutter going for the entire back straight as you exit the corner and activate NOS, which is quite random from my testing. There doesn't seem to be a consistent line that starts or maintains the stutter, but maybe I'm wrong.
• As mentioned, most of the top runners didn't share their tunes, but thankfully Pyrelli did on GT Vault, and their tunes are accessible on the Wayback Machine. There's two tunes I'll highlight: their ZZ-II tune, which is a nice starting point but there seems to be room for improvement with softer springs, stabilisers, a VCD setting of 10 (or no VCD at all) and a rear ballast, and their Skyline GT-R V-spec II Nur tune which seems much better-equipped to exploit the stutter effect. When trying to make my own ZZ-II tune, I pretty much used a combination of the two.
• Fine-tuning the car is very difficult because of how random the stutter is. It felt like I was going in circles making adjustments and testing them, when it seems to be a game of luck whether you get the stutter or not.

Hopefully there's people more knowledgeable than me who can add to this. I think this is an interesting topic, and it's a shame that there was so much secrecy back in the day.

 

[mcsqueegy]

I was doing research and trying to understand how people in this thread were managing to get such high speeds, but the info is scattered all over the place. On top of that, the people on the leaderboard rarely shared their tunes publicly, forcing everyone to go through trial and error to find the 'right' tune. So, for anyone interested in reaching these crazy 320mph+ speeds, here's a bullet-point summary so you don't need to sift through the thread:

• On PAL, because the game runs at 50 FPS and has less physics calculations, you can set up your car's suspension in such a way that it stutters around Test Course's bends and builds up speed extremely quickly. You can see this in Lizzie's run above me; notice how the car's acceleration rises sharply around the bend. The stutter doesn't seem to happen on NTSC versions from my testing. So, basically, you need to use PAL to stand a chance of beating these records.
• The stutter appears to be caused by an imbalance of front and rear grip, along with a bouncy suspension setup. The key settings are a stiff front damper bound and soft rebound, max front camber, very low front downforce and very high rear downforce. Soft springs also seem to help. You want the rear wheels to have as much traction as possible, but you also want to make sure the car doesn't understeer too much exiting the bend. I've seen mentions of placing a ~ 200kg ballast on the car, presumably at the back. I thought that you needed to run super hards on front and super softs on rear so the front tyres lose grip more easily, but Lizzie managed to make it work with super softs on both sides.
• Gear setup kind of matters, but it doesn't seem like you need to think too much about it. Most people just set Auto to 25 and adjusted the final gear and individual gears afterwards. You could probably minimax it using the gear trick, but you can probably make it work with wider gears as long as you're not gearing up to 5th or 6th too early. Gearing up can stabilise the car and cancel the stutter.
• For the fastest runs possible, you need to keep the stutter going for the entire back straight as you exit the corner and activate NOS, which is quite random from my testing. There doesn't seem to be a consistent line that starts or maintains the stutter, but maybe I'm wrong.
• As mentioned, most of the top runners didn't share their tunes, but thankfully Pirelli did on GT Vault, and their tunes are accessible on the Wayback Machine. There's two tunes I'll highlight: their ZZ-II tune, which is a nice starting point but there seems to be room for improvement with softer springs, stabilisers, a VCD setting of 10 (or no VCD at all) and a rear ballast, and their Skyline GT-R V-spec II Nur tune which seems much better-equipped to exploit the stutter effect. When trying to make my own ZZ-II tune, I pretty much used a combination of the two.
• Fine-tuning the car is very difficult because of how random the stutter is. It felt like I was going in circles making adjustments and testing them, when it seems to be a game of luck whether you get the stutter or not.

Hopefully there's people more knowledgeable than me who can add to this. I think this is an interesting topic, and it's a shame that there was so much secrecy back in the day.

For the most part you're absolutely right. Just to be clear, though - NTSC has a few cars that are much faster than PAL. The Escudo and R34 Pace Car (no lights) both gain over 10mph on NTSC compared to PAL, and some RWD cars like the GT-One and Oreca Viper. 'Stutter' setups definitely work on NTSC but generally aren't as quick.

Just to add to the confusing nature of AWD cars, some of them don't even need the weird setups to go fast... 3000GT's and the FTO SuperTourer do best with a mostly RWD setup, min springs and no camber for example. My Subaru Spec C setup did 307mph without high camber, no diff or VCD, and max ballast towards the front of the car.

Would be interesting to know why the game does this with AWD cars but even modders would struggle to figure it out I suspect

 

[Tornado]

I was doing research and trying to understand how people in this thread were managing to get such high speeds, but the info is scattered all over the place. On top of that, the people on the leaderboard rarely shared their tunes publicly, forcing everyone to go through trial and error to find the 'right' tune.

I think this is an interesting topic, and it's a shame that there was so much secrecy back in the day.

This thread was chronicling an active rolling competition between people contemporary with the game's release. It was never a tuning information depository; nevermind one for people coming into the thread 18 years later.

 

[TeaKanji]

For the most part you're absolutely right. Just to be clear, though - NTSC has a few cars that are much faster than PAL. The Escudo and R34 Pace Car (no lights) both gain over 10mph on NTSC compared to PAL, and some RWD cars like the GT-One and Oreca Viper. 'Stutter' setups definitely work on NTSC but generally aren't as quick.

Just to add to the confusing nature of AWD cars, some of them don't even need the weird setups to go fast... 3000GT's and the FTO SuperTourer do best with a mostly RWD setup, min springs and no camber for example. My Subaru Spec C setup did 307mph without high camber, no diff or VCD, and max ballast towards the front of the car.

Would be interesting to know why the game does this with AWD cars but even modders would struggle to figure it out I suspect

This was just the insight I was looking for, thanks for chiming in. I edited my post with some corrections.

Yeah, that makes sense; it was the ZZ-II I tested across PAL and NTSC-U, and I couldn't get it to work on the latter so I assumed it was 'fixed'. I assume the different AWD types are a factor in how their setups wildly differ, but the Impreza Spec C is an extremely weird car in general so I'm not surprised it required such a bespoke setup. I'm guessing it's all something to do with downforce, because it'd also explain why MR race cars are way more likely to snap oversteer on PAL, along with the stuttering RPM needle 'glitch'.

This thread was chronicling an active rolling competition between people contemporary with the game's release. It was never a tuning information depository; nevermind one for people coming into the thread 18 years later.

I stand by what I said. I fully support competition, I think it's a great way for a community to work together and push some boundaries. It's why I've organized my own community competitions for GT2. However, I also believe in transparency and providing resources that can allow anyone interested to join in without forcing them through hours of trial and error. In fairness, the top runners did provide hints about their setups throughout this thread, but besides Pyrelli's tunes, I felt I had very little to work with.

Considering we're in the GT4 Tuning sub-forum, I believe competition can still exist while tuning knowledge and setups are shared to bring the rest of the community up-to-speed. I'm not calling out or shunning anyone for things that happened 18 years ago, I understand that internet culture in general was completely different back then. I just think there's a valuable lesson to be learned here.

 

[MadMax]

I was doing research and trying to understand how people in this thread were managing to get such high speeds, but the info is scattered all over the place. On top of that, the people on the leaderboard rarely shared their tunes publicly, forcing everyone to go through trial and error to find the 'right' tune. So, for anyone interested in reaching these crazy 320mph+ speeds, here's a bullet-point summary so you don't need to sift through the thread:

• On PAL, because the game runs at 50 FPS and has less physics calculations, you can set up your car's suspension in such a way that it stutters around Test Course's bends and builds up speed extremely quickly. You can see this in Lizzie's run above me; notice how the car's acceleration rises sharply around the bend. The stutter doesn't seem to happen on NTSC versions from my testing (EDIT: seems like it does work, it's just car-dependent: see mcsqueegy's post below me). So, basically, you need to use PAL to stand a chance of beating these records.
• The stutter appears to be caused by an imbalance of front and rear grip, along with a bouncy suspension setup. The key settings are a stiff front damper bound and soft rebound, max front camber, max toe-out, very low front downforce and very high rear downforce. Soft springs also seem to help. You want the rear wheels to have as much traction as possible, but you also want to make sure the car doesn't understeer too much exiting the bend. I've seen mentions of placing a ~ 200kg ballast on the car, presumably at the back. I thought that you needed to run super hards on front and super softs on rear so the front tyres lose grip more easily, but Lizzie managed to make it work with super softs on both sides.
• Gear setup kind of matters, but it doesn't seem like you need to think too much about it. Most people just set Auto to 25 and adjusted the final gear and individual gears afterwards. You could probably minimax it using the gear trick, but you can make it work with wider gears as long as you're not gearing up to 5th or 6th too early. Gearing up can stabilise the car and cancel the stutter.
• For the fastest runs possible, you need to keep the stutter going for the entire back straight as you exit the corner and activate NOS, which is quite random from my testing. There doesn't seem to be a consistent line that starts or maintains the stutter, but maybe I'm wrong.
• As mentioned, most of the top runners didn't share their tunes, but thankfully Pyrelli did on GT Vault, and their tunes are accessible on the Wayback Machine. There's two tunes I'll highlight: their ZZ-II tune, which is a nice starting point but there seems to be room for improvement with softer springs, stabilisers, a VCD setting of 10 (or no VCD at all) and a rear ballast, and their Skyline GT-R V-spec II Nur tune which seems much better-equipped to exploit the stutter effect. When trying to make my own ZZ-II tune, I pretty much used a combination of the two.
• Fine-tuning the car is very difficult because of how random the stutter is. It felt like I was going in circles making adjustments and testing them, when it seems to be a game of luck whether you get the stutter or not.

Hopefully there's people more knowledgeable than me who can add to this. I think this is an interesting topic, and it's a shame that there was so much secrecy back in the day.

We started something with @mcsqueegy way back to shine some light on these tunes. Link

 

[TeaKanji]

We started something with @mcsqueegy way back to shine some light on these tunes. Link

Excellent, thanks for this, will have a read through and test some stuff out. I'm glad someone else noticed that there was a 'gap in the market' for these setups, so to speak. I see now what mcsqueegy meant about some cars requiring 'unique' setups; that Delta S4 tune is wild. Happy this is all still preserved and not lost to time, this is quite valuable IMO.

 

[Ziggler]

I was doing research and trying to understand how people in this thread were managing to get such high speeds, but the info is scattered all over the place. On top of that, the people on the leaderboard rarely shared their tunes publicly, forcing everyone to go through trial and error to find the 'right' tune. So, for anyone interested in reaching these crazy 320mph+ speeds, here's a bullet-point summary so you don't need to sift through the thread:

• On PAL, because the game runs at 50 FPS and has less physics calculations, you can set up your car's suspension in such a way that it stutters around Test Course's bends and builds up speed extremely quickly. You can see this in Lizzie's run above me; notice how the car's acceleration rises sharply around the bend. The stutter doesn't seem to happen on NTSC versions from my testing (EDIT: seems like it does work, it's just car-dependent: see mcsqueegy's post below me). So, basically, you need to use PAL to stand a chance of beating these records.
• The stutter appears to be caused by an imbalance of front and rear grip, along with a bouncy suspension setup. The key settings are a stiff front damper bound and soft rebound, max front camber, max toe-out, very low front downforce and very high rear downforce. Soft springs also seem to help. You want the rear wheels to have as much traction as possible, but you also want to make sure the car doesn't understeer too much exiting the bend. I've seen mentions of placing a ~ 200kg ballast on the car, presumably at the back. I thought that you needed to run super hards on front and super softs on rear so the front tyres lose grip more easily, but Lizzie managed to make it work with super softs on both sides.
• Gear setup kind of matters, but it doesn't seem like you need to think too much about it. Most people just set Auto to 25 and adjusted the final gear and individual gears afterwards. You could probably minimax it using the gear trick, but you can make it work with wider gears as long as you're not gearing up to 5th or 6th too early. Gearing up can stabilise the car and cancel the stutter.
• For the fastest runs possible, you need to keep the stutter going for the entire back straight as you exit the corner and activate NOS, which is quite random from my testing. There doesn't seem to be a consistent line that starts or maintains the stutter, but maybe I'm wrong.
• As mentioned, most of the top runners didn't share their tunes, but thankfully Pyrelli did on GT Vault, and their tunes are accessible on the Wayback Machine. There's two tunes I'll highlight: their ZZ-II tune, which is a nice starting point but there seems to be room for improvement with softer springs, stabilisers, a VCD setting of 10 (or no VCD at all) and a rear ballast, and their Skyline GT-R V-spec II Nur tune which seems much better-equipped to exploit the stutter effect. When trying to make my own ZZ-II tune, I pretty much used a combination of the two.
• Fine-tuning the car is very difficult because of how random the stutter is. It felt like I was going in circles making adjustments and testing them, when it seems to be a game of luck whether you get the stutter or not.

Hopefully there's people more knowledgeable than me who can add to this. I think this is an interesting topic, and it's a shame that there was so much secrecy back in the day.

I wish I had known this on my old account in 2009!

 

[Lizzie97]

I was doing research and trying to understand how people in this thread were managing to get such high speeds, but the info is scattered all over the place. On top of that, the people on the leaderboard rarely shared their tunes publicly, forcing everyone to go through trial and error to find the 'right' tune. So, for anyone interested in reaching these crazy 320mph+ speeds, here's a bullet-point summary so you don't need to sift through the thread:

• On PAL, because the game runs at 50 FPS and has less physics calculations, you can set up your car's suspension in such a way that it stutters around Test Course's bends and builds up speed extremely quickly. You can see this in Lizzie's run above me; notice how the car's acceleration rises sharply around the bend. The stutter doesn't seem to happen on NTSC versions from my testing (EDIT: seems like it does work, it's just car-dependent: see mcsqueegy's post below me). So, basically, you need to use PAL to stand a chance of beating these records.
• The stutter appears to be caused by an imbalance of front and rear grip, along with a bouncy suspension setup. The key settings are a stiff front damper bound and soft rebound, max front camber, max toe-out, very low front downforce and very high rear downforce. Soft springs also seem to help. You want the rear wheels to have as much traction as possible, but you also want to make sure the car doesn't understeer too much exiting the bend. I've seen mentions of placing a ~ 200kg ballast on the car, presumably at the back. I thought that you needed to run super hards on front and super softs on rear so the front tyres lose grip more easily, but Lizzie managed to make it work with super softs on both sides.
• Gear setup kind of matters, but it doesn't seem like you need to think too much about it. Most people just set Auto to 25 and adjusted the final gear and individual gears afterwards. You could probably minimax it using the gear trick, but you can make it work with wider gears as long as you're not gearing up to 5th or 6th too early. Gearing up can stabilise the car and cancel the stutter.
• For the fastest runs possible, you need to keep the stutter going for the entire back straight as you exit the corner and activate NOS, which is quite random from my testing. There doesn't seem to be a consistent line that starts or maintains the stutter, but maybe I'm wrong.
• As mentioned, most of the top runners didn't share their tunes, but thankfully Pyrelli did on GT Vault, and their tunes are accessible on the Wayback Machine. There's two tunes I'll highlight: their ZZ-II tune, which is a nice starting point but there seems to be room for improvement with softer springs, stabilisers, a VCD setting of 10 (or no VCD at all) and a rear ballast, and their Skyline GT-R V-spec II Nur tune which seems much better-equipped to exploit the stutter effect. When trying to make my own ZZ-II tune, I pretty much used a combination of the two.
• Fine-tuning the car is very difficult because of how random the stutter is. It felt like I was going in circles making adjustments and testing them, when it seems to be a game of luck whether you get the stutter or not.

Hopefully there's people more knowledgeable than me who can add to this. I think this is an interesting topic, and it's a shame that there was so much secrecy back in the day.

I just noticed this answer and you actually said everything well with a few exceptions that I will mention. The first one was the cherry on top of the cake for my World Record,

when you say: " For the fastest runs possible, you need to keep the stutter going for the entire back straight as you exit the corner and activate NOS, which is quite random from my testing. There doesn't seem to be a consistent line that starts or maintains the stutter, but maybe I'm wrong."

If you notice the NOS bar in my run you will notice something spectacular, it's indeed very hard to trigger the "magic balance" how I call it, with both super softs, so I use NOS to trigger it, then I use all the NOS along the curve. And in the straight there is no NOS until the last bit of RNG to get some extra speed. The NOS makes the car act really random while without NOS the car just keeps speeding normally with the right size of the 6th gear.

There is also a secret stuff that I told @mcsqueegy that lets the car keep the speed up without NOS and I discovered that randomly, I will keep it as a secret for you to figure out

 

[crimson_menace]

I wish I could get my eyes on that old Leader board. There were some monstrous speeds out of some unexpected cars.

This thread is 3 years older than my oldest son. My, how time flies...I hope all is well, my guys. ❤️

 

[mcsqueegy]

I wish I could get my eyes on that old Leader board. There were some monstrous speeds out of some unexpected cars.

This thread is 3 years older than my oldest son. My, how time flies...I hope all is well, my guys. ❤️

Can't get anything up to date, but here's a snapshot from September '08... obviously more speeds since, but most of them would be mine anyway I have a detailed update on the previous page for some records and new cars since then.

You'll be happy to know you kept the record for the BMW McLaren F1 GTR Race Car after all this time

 

[crimson_menace]

Can't get anything up to date, but here's a snapshot from September '08... obviously more speeds since, but most of them would be mine anyway I have a detailed update on the previous page for some records and new cars since then.

You'll be happy to know you kept the record for the BMW McLaren F1 GTR Race Car after all this time

I appreciate you bud. Thanks and it's so cool to see all the old names and records on there! You're the MVP today. God bless.