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Our best tips for tuning cars in Project CARS 2
Tuning your car correctly is essential if you want to make the most of your racing potential. Here’s how to do it.
If you truly want to excel at racing games, particularly those as dedicated to recreating reality as Projects Cars 2, then you need to learn how to tune your cars to best tackle specific tracks and opponents. Before you even sit in your car you should be comfortable that you know exactly how it’s going to react to your inputs, how it’s going to perform in corners and through straights and what you can expect from it in comparison to your opposition.
You can get to know your car in this way simply by driving it a lot, but it’s better to get to know it in such a way that you’re able to alter its core set-up to suit your needs. The only way to do this is by lifting up the hood and tuning it yourself.
Project CARS 2 includes a huge number of tuning options and we’ve got a handy breakdown of how you should start your adventure in tuning. Follow these steps and you’ll see significant improvements to your lap times.
1. Newcomer? Use the Race Engineer
Project CARS 2’s tuning menus provide a very helpful Race Engineer option in which the game will come to a decision regarding how to tune your car for you, basing its decisions on your answers to simple questions relating to your driving and your perception of the car you’re using.
In relation to braking, for instance, you can state to the Race Engineer that the number one issue you’re having is that the car is not stopping in time for a corner or that you find that you’re starting to slide whenever you begin braking. For the gear ratios you can answer that the car is too slow in accelerating or that it’s impossible for you to hit top speed on the track in question.
If you pay attention to how the game is altering your tuning set-up based on these answers, then you’re gaining a huge volume of valuable knowledge that you can thereafter use when you’re confident enough to begin tuning your vehicle for yourself. Just make sure you’ve driven the car you’re going to use before answering the questions so that you can answers as accurately as possible.
2. Always choose your tyres manually
The most straightforward and immediately obvious way to get extra performance from your vehicle is by choosing the right tyres. Track tyre options in Project CARS 2 include slicks and wet tyres, while ice and all-terrain alternative sets of rubber exist for more rugged surfaces.
In the simplest terms, you’ll want to use slick tyres in the dry and wet tyres in the rain and/or when there’s imminent potential for rain. The next level of choice involves hardness of the tyre and making sure you know to equip something like a soft slick and when to use the hard slicks.
The soft edition provides better grip and therefore can lead to better lap times. On the flip side, they wear down quicker and in longer races you’ll be heading frequently to the pit lane. During longer races it’s best to balance the use of hard and soft, swapping as you pit and depending on your position and remaining number of laps.
No point having a nice car if you can't tune it
© Bandai Namco Entertainment
3. Default gear ratios don’t work for all tracks
Gear ratios dictate how quickly your car wants to move up through its gears. Shorter ratios provide you with the weapon of greater acceleration, whereas longer ones keep you in a specific gear longer and give you greater top speed.
As such, it pays huge dividends to change your gear ratios based on the design of the track you’re racing. If the track has lots of tight corners then you’re going to be accelerating out of corners a lot, making shorter ratios a good option. Additionally, lots of corners means a lot of braking and that makes it unlikely that you’re ever going to come close to hitting your car’s maximum speed. For a track with long straights and little braking you want to prioritise high speeds and for that you want to assign higher ratios.
This basic rule changes depending on the exact makeup of your car and where you think your own driving skills are most in need of being boosted, so make sure to experiment in testing before locking in your final ratio decisions.
4. How to approach rallycross
The rallycross discipline is a very different challenge to that of Project CARS 2’s other race types, and it requires a different kind of tuning set-up to make the most of the car and your own ability behind the wheel.
You should bring the car’s centre of gravity down as much as possible by reducing the resting height of its suspension. The lower the centre of gravity, the more responsive it will be when turning into corners. In rallycross you want cornering to be as responsive as possible given how frequently turns come at you and how quickly you need to meander from one to the next – often sideways.
To achieve a low centre of gravity you need to go into the Suspension tuning menu and set the ride height to the shorter end of the scale. Set the rear tyres very slightly higher than the front to exaggerate the down force on the front tyres when turning into a corner. It’s the front that enters first and they set the velocity for the back end, so the front needs to be able to react instantly to your inputs on the wheel.
The negative of a low ride height is the fact that the car's more liable to ‘bottom out’ and hit its underside on the track surface. To combat this go into the Dampers tuning menu and firm up the bump stop setting on front and back. A firmer bump stop reduces the maximum amount of compression of the suspension and lessens the risk of bottoming out. In real life this makes for a very uncomfortable ride, but that’s not a problem we have to think about.
Project CARS 2 is released on September 22 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
