Tuning is an integral part of Gran Turismo 7, especially for those looking to take on Sport Mode or league races. You may even find it useful for getting all those Cafe books completed!
So, we thought it would be about time to put together a guide on how to tune in the game. We’ll also include how you can achieve certain effects while driving.
Okay, let’s jump in and take a look!
The Tuning Screen
To access the tuning screen, you’ll have to head to a race of your choice, select ‘Settings’, then ‘Car Settings’, and scroll to the bottom to the tab named ‘Detailed Settings’.
First of all, don’t be afraid by how busy your screen just became! In fact, that left third of the entire screen just shows your car's stats. Each time you make an adjustment, you can see how it will affect your vehicle - just be sure to hit ‘triangle’ to update those numbers!
The rest of the screen is just for swapping out parts and adjusting settings.
Finally, at the top of the screen you can change sheets. This is especially useful for having different, useful tunes for different tracks.
Suspension
Suspension is one of the most important parts of the tuning section, and can make a car incredibly fun (or difficult) to drive.
Starting with ride height, you want to set your ride height as low as possible, without the car bottoming out. This is a rather general rule, and not a one size fits all, but in most tarmac racing scenarios, a low ride height is better.
Lowering this will shift your car's centre of gravity down, which leads to less body sway. As such, you should end up with slightly more grip, and increased stability as well. If you set this up too low, or incorrectly, you’ll see a huge amount of understeer, so watch out!
Next up, we’ve got anti-roll bars. A Lower front value generally leads to oversteer and a lower rear value will generally result in understeer. Once again, however, this isn’t a one size fits all answer.
Much like with ride height, it is easy to set your anti-roll bars too stiff and end up with a loss of grip. So, adjust both at the same time and have a few laps in the car to check that any changes you’ve made are beneficial first.
Damping ratio is the next setting, and adjusts both the compression and expansion. With softer dampers you’ll have an easier time on the curbs and over bumps, or transitioning in tight sections of the course. However, you may end up with a sluggish feeling in the steering.
Likewise, too hard and the car will struggle on the curbs and over any slight bumps, but will feel incredibly responsive.
This setting, if adjusted, is often unique to each circuit. As such, be sure to make use of those tuning sheets for this!
Natural frequency is effectively the spring rate of the car. You’ll want to stiffen this to reduce any body roll.
Like with the anti-roll bars it’s often good to tune these together, and then hone in on a specific front and rear balance.
In addition, the tyre compound can affect the Natural Frequency. So, generally when using a better compound tyre, you’ll want to run stiffer springs. Once again though, do a few laps each time you change this to find what works for you and the car.
Now, the final two settings in suspension can often be treated as a single entity, as they play off each other significantly.
Camber changes the angle of the wheel comparatively to the horizontal edge of the car. What it adjusts is how much of the tyre is in contact with the surface of the track at any time.
Toe is generally not touched. It’s easy to get this setting wrong and end up with masses of tyre wear and unnecessary heat in them as well.
If you do go for anything on the Toe setting, we recommend a little bit of toe-out which can greatly help on corner entry. Only start playing around with the toe once you’ve adjusted the rest of your car's setup.
Differential
This affects how much of the power of your vehicle goes to each wheel. This, naturally, can be quite an important setting when tuning your car.
The initial torque, in layman’s terms, is how much it locks the left and right wheels of the car. Start low and work your way up, as it is easy to end up with a value that is too high, and with masses of understeer.
This is yet another tuning option that can be quite track dependent, so be careful how you adjust this between races.
Acceleration sensitivity affects how much your diff locks when, you guessed it, accelerating. This tends to come into play on corner exit more so than anywhere else.
It is also dependent on whether you have a front or rear-wheel-drive car, or, of course, all-wheel drive. For rear-wheel-drive cars and the rear diff when using an all-wheel-drive car, a higher value will result in on-power oversteer. Thus, it can also increase corner exit speed.
For front-wheel-drive, and the front diff in all-wheel drive cars, you’ll want to find the optimal amount of tyre spin for the front left and front right. You can use replay mode to watch the front wheels of the car and find the value at which the transition from front left spinning to front right spinning occurs.
Finally, the last setting you’ll want to look at in differential is torque-vectoring. This effectively decides how much power gets sent to the front or rear of the car.
It’s pretty basic, but a higher rear value tends to result in more oversteer and a higher front value in understeer.
Aerodynamics
A general rule of thumb for aero is that a higher value will result in more grip and enable you to corner at speed. However, you will also end up with more tyre wear and a loss of top speed.
For the front, a higher value will likely help your car on corner entry, while a higher rear value will result in increased stability. Once again, it is very important to look at this setting on a track-by-track basis.
Some tracks will benefit from masses of downforce, such as tight, city tracks, whereas others, such as ovals, will likely want you to run a slightly lower aero value. This is because the oval track lends itself to much higher speeds.
This setting is also closely related to many of your suspension settings, so be sure to monitor how the car feels after each change and a couple of laps. If something feels off, revisit your suspension settings.
For example, a high rear downforce setting may mean that you want to increase your rear ride height above the value of your front ride height. This is known as rake and is quite common. You don’t want the nose of your car ‘higher’ than the rear of your car under speed!
Ballast and ECU
These two often go hand-in-hand, as for Sport mode, you will often use them to lower the PP value of a car.
Just be careful here, as ballast will directly affect the weight distribution of the car. You can use this to achieve more over or understeer.
However, make sure to keep an eye on your tyre wear as well as your springs. If your rear tyres go way before your front tyres, try moving some of that ballast forwards. Likewise, be sure to increase the spring rate by a marginal amount depending on where you put the ballast.
You don’t want to nail your suspension setup and then add ballast that ruins all your hard work!
Transmission
This setting can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. Longer gears result in a higher top speed and slower acceleration, and vice versa for shorter gears.
Your transmission is another setting that will vary from track to track. Some tracks, whilst having a long lap, may be very complex and lacking in straight or high-speed sections. Here, you will want to decrease your top speed slightly, as you likely won’t reach the top of your highest gear, make sense?
If you want to go even more in-depth, you can jump into the manual settings, and adjust each gear individually. If, at a specific track, you notice that your car doesn’t feel comfortable in third or fourth out of the corners, adjust the gears so that you are in the car’s powerband when exiting them.
This last part isn’t essential and is quite advanced. As such, be sure to note down what the values were beforehand so you can return them to the original if need be.
Nitrous
This is the most simple of the settings. The percentage will dictate how strong the nitrous is when you use it.
The main principle here is to make sure you don’t finish the race with any left, but likewise, you’ve managed to use some of it on every lap.
Final words
The most important thing for many of these tuning elements is to make small changes each time. This way, you can tell which element is making a difference in the way the car feels.
If you change a number of settings at once, you won’t know which setting has changed what.
So, best of luck out there, and happy tuning!