During the early stages of Gran Turismo 7, you’re going to be driving FF (front-wheel drive) cars a lot, and the trouble with FF cars — especially when you start increasing their bhp — is that they understeer a lot. Understeer is where you just can’t get the car to turn sharply enough without dropping your speed way too low. On courses with a lot of sharp turns and hairpin bends, like Deep Forest Raceway and Tsukuba Circuit, this can become a big problem. Your opponents will cut inside you at corners while your car seems determined to throw itself out the outside of the bend.
So, what can you do about understeer? Well, like most things in GT7, the secret is in how you tune your car. Possible solutions include setting your front toe angle out and your rear toe angle in, decreasing the damping ratios at the front and decreasing them at the rear, setting your brake balance more to the rear, and increasing downforce. Adjusting toe angle and damping ratio will require Fully Customizable Suspension, adjusting brake balance requires a Brake Balance Controller, and adjusting downforce requires a racing car body. So, all of these solutions are expensive, and difficult to get right if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Related: Best tires to use in Gran Turismo 7
But there is a cheaper, simpler, more reliable way to stop your car understeering. Simply fit softer tires at the front than at the rear. Just one degree softer, mind, otherwise your car will probably be very difficult to control. So, for example, we put Sports: Medium tires on the front of our Renault Clio, and Sports: Hard tires on the rear, and it immediately handled so much better, especially on tight corners. No need for messing around with the suspension or brake ratios. Exactly what helps will depend a lot on the car (and the driver), but this is definitely a simple and effective fix for understeer in FF cars.
