The Goal of Tuning –
Cars You Enjoy Driving Fast.

Tuning a car in Gran Turismo 7 can seem like a formidable task. The game is a great racing simulator for PS4 and PS5 and has a myriad of options available. The goal of this guide is to help you learn to tune cars to behave the way you expect and like to drive on the track. I have been tuning cars in Gran Turismo since it was first released 25 years ago, as well as in real life with my rally car, and two track cars. I’m here to show you how to extract more performance and drivability for your favorite cars.

I have found that this iteration of Gran Turismo has introduced much more realistic behaviors to the car’s suspension geometry, tire grip, aerodynamic configurations, and differential settings. Applying real-world logic to the cars in the game has proven very effective at creating cars that are fun to drive. Curing the oversteer prevalent with many cars in the game can be done with a bit of work, and it provides a pretty rewarding experience for someone like me who loves racing.

This guide will not only teach you what all the settings do, but why they do it, and how you can use them to make the car behave the way you want it to. Each driver is different and you may take a tune that I like and tweak it because you have a heavier foot and don’t like as much of an oversteer-weighted car, or because your driving style doesn’t lend itself well to trail braking into corners. It’s up to you, and you’ll understand why a car does what it does and how to change it.

If you’re looking for a quick fix for your car’s settings and you aren’t into learning how to do it, this guide is definitely not for you. Learning as much as possible and figuring out how you can become a great tuner is my goal for you with this. I’ve spent a huge amount of time on this guide and hope you find value in reading it!

What the Settings Do

These are the basic settings available in the game, and how the adjustment functionally changes the car. Each of these items performs a specific function and adding the sum of the changes together produces the handling characteristics of the car. These settings also adjust what the game determines is the PP (performance points) of the car. Adding and removing components as well as tweaking their configurations will affect how the game believes your car can perform.

Differential Gear

Controlling the behavior of how the power gets to the road is the function of the differential section. This piece translates power from the engine to the respective drive wheels.

You can upgrade this to fully customizable and even add a torque vectoring center differential on AWD cars which allows you to select how much power to send to front or back axles as desired.

Changing these settings can dramatically affect your car’s behavior when adding or removing throttle. 

ECU

When you upgrade the ECU (electronic control unit, some people say engine control unit) of your car in the tuning shop you gain the ability to control the engine’s power output. There are several levels and depending on your willingness to invest, I always recommend getting the fully customizable one.

The basic engine ‘tune’ for power output changes with each different option, with the most coming from the customizable one, as well as allowing you to cut back on power – which is a very useful tuning piece.

Supercharger

The section is mis-labeled in my opinion and should be called Forced Induction. Forced Induction means you are adding air to the engine by literally forcing more into the engine with some kind of fan. In our case we have either turbo or superchargers. 

You can buy these components, as well as intercoolers, in various configurations in the tuning shop.

The amount of turbo or supercharging on the engine will add power at different RPM (revolutions per minute) levels.

Steering

Here you can select whether or not to use a steering angle adapter you’ve purchased from the tuning shop, as well as whether or not to use and adjust the 4WS (four wheel steering system.

This function allows you to increase the angle you can turn and is very helpful for drift tuning.

Bodywork

Another section that shows irreversible changes you’ve made to the body like weight reduction and increasing rigidity. You can reset this only by purchasing a new body for the car.

The tuning process – settings, test & tweak.

First and foremost, Gran Turismo 7 gives you the ability to create tunes and save them as Settings Sheets. This means you can configure your car for different tracks or types of driving. One track might be very smooth (Daytona) and another extremely bumpy (Nurburgring Nordschleife) so it benefits you to tune the handling for both.

A top-tip here is to always, I mean always, save an ‘original’ settings sheet when you get the car and keep that. Don’t change it. There doesn’t seem to be a way to set any configurations to default without buying a new car. Be warned. Adding a new sheet, and not duplicating, will give you the car’s default settings.

The best practice is to duplicate your settings sheet and give it an appropriate name before you begin making changes. I have 8 different sheets just for my BMW 3.0 CSL alone. Once I’ve made some adjustments I often save versions along the way and duplicate and change until I get what I like. Maybe I changed some downforce and didn’t like it – this way it’s easy to compare differences as well as go back to what worked before.

Second is the process of actually tuning the car. This means making changes to any of the available settings and then testing to see how it drives. There is a LOT of driving while tuning, one of my favorite parts of the process! You get to see how the setting tweak affects the car’s handling. Once you make your observations – perhaps when you hit a bump you lose control – you can either mentally note that or write it on a pad if you’re a nerd like me. Then exit out to the track menu and go tweak your setting(s).

I recommend changing one or two settings that work together at a time. The less you change, the more you can see how the car responds to the specific change you make.

Once you’ve made the change, go and test it for a lap (or a portion of a lap) and then tweak again. The process of tuning is repeating this process with every setting you wish or need to change until the car behaves the way you want it to.

Detailed Settings Tutorial –
Creating a Balanced Car

Every scenario is different, but most people want the same thing, a fast car you can drive fast. This means generally more powerful and lighter weight. You achieve those ends through purchasing upgrades in the tuning shop for the vehicle. Some of those upgrades might be weight reduction, fully customizable suspension, or even adding a wing in GT Auto. For the most tunable car you’re going to want the fully customizable everything. This can be a detriment though when entering lower PP races, as you can remove some components and still have a high-power, low-weight car that performs well, but maybe doesn’t have racing brakes or a racing transmission. There are trade-offs for the perfect PP.

Controlling Weight Transfer

Balancing a car to your driving style really comes down to how well you want to, or can, control weight transfer in the corners and through accelleration and braking.

The main components we modify here are in the suspension, regardless of what tires are on the car. We may also work with ballast if we’re restricting to a certain PP or want to alter the weight balance forward/rear of the car, but we’ll get into that later.

I enjoy driving cars that are very well controlled, if maybe a little on the softer side. I like to explore the behavior of cars that shift weight forward and back and side to side a little more forcefully, but in a controlled way. This allows more potential grip on the tires weighted on the outside of the corner and can result in a very stable feeling.

Stiff springs result in less compression overall, controlled with the spring rate (higher Hz = stiffer), and weight transfer from one side to the other, along with the anti-roll bar, which inhibits the car’s body tilting to the side while turning. This can also be impacted by the ride height front and rear.

In the left-most column of the settings sheet, near the bottom you’ll see ‘Stability’ and ‘Rotational G’. These are measurements by the game of the car’s inherent stability at low and high speed, and the amount of G forces it can handle before breaking grip at a given speed.

When you change a setting or piece of equipment you can press the triangle button and the new PP will be calculated which will also update these numbers. Small adjustments can make large changes, so tread carefully with your tweaks!

Understanding Grip Limits

The surface you’re racing on and the tires you have on the car are two primary ways the car grips the road. The limit of grip can change based on the angle of the surface, the amount of tire in contact with the road, the weight on each tire, and so many more factors.

Grip limits in Gran Turismo 7 are very unpredictable depending on the track and car. Just like in real life. Altering one setting will affect another and change how much grip the car has.

Suspension configuration can influence the limit of grip pretty significantly, but the biggest factor here is tire selection. Soft racing tires have the most grip but shortest life. If there’s no tire wear, or PP limit, use these tires and enjoy generally cornering faster.

I often have different suspension setups for each kind of tire based on the amount of grip that tire has. This allows more nuanced control over the car’s behavior and gives me the ability to add some consistency to the feeling regardless of the tire’s grip. It’s also true that a tune that is good on Racing Hard tires will likely be good on Soft as well, so select your tuning options as you learn how different tires behave.

I also often create an all around tune where I use a specific set of tires, then change them and run the same course, making minor adjustments, through all the racing tires, plus intermediates and heavy wets. This gives me a well-rounded car for a race that might have both dry and wet conditions and a performance point limit. GT7 has yet to introduce any longer endurance races so it might be premature to spend much time on this, but I am a super nerd so I already have.

Tuning For Grip

I always tune for grip before adding power. The reason for this is when you add power, you add problems. They are problems you want to have (faster is better!) and that can be solved, but as you add power smaller changes can have bigger consequences. Therefore I try to set up the car to drive well on whatever tires I bought for it before making a 700hp monster. My logic is that if it drives well normally, then adding power means slightly tweaking things to make it drive well under more giddie up.

Begin by making a new settings sheet and then taking the car to your favorite track. I almost always tune a car in time trial mode on the Nurburgring Nordschleife. It’s the most demanding track with plenty of corners, elevation changes, and places to test the car. I also know pretty quickly what needs to change (and it’s my favorite track!).

Start out by driving at a SLOW speed, under 75 mph (120 kph), and test acceleration under low throttle, progressive throttle, and full throttle. Low is just a light pressure on the trigger/pedal, progressive starts light and works up to full over about 3 seconds, and full is literally dropping the hammer at full pressure. I do this on straights and in a few corners. Just moseying around to get a feel for what needs to change.

I also decelerate through some turns and on the straights to see how the car behaves. I generally drive pretty slow in order to not spend my time in the grass as much as figuring out what needs to be adjusted.

Depending on the what drive wheel setup the car has (FF,FR,RR,AWD) you might experience several things. Wheel spin is likely present at some level of throttle, depending on how much power and the tires you have. You might spin out while accelerating under light throttle in a turn, or progressive throttle, or any throttle, thanks to GT’s new penchant for spinning wheels and cars.

Removing wheel spin can be accomplished a few ways, and considering I like to keep all the power and eventually add more, I start by working on the ride height and LSD (limited slip differential) settings. We’ll work with initial torque, acceleration sensitivity, and braking sensitivity.  

Ride height influences grip marginally, as generally lower cars will handle better, but some cars have more grip when higher in the front or back. This has a minor influence on the weight balance of the car, front to back. I will start by raising the back or the front and driving a bit, then coming back and doing the opposite. This may make some difference, it may make none. As a rule of thumb, I like RR and FR drive cars higher in the back, AWD mostly level, and FF cars higher in the front. This will change with power addition, but setting my example car 20mm higher in the back reduced the initial wheel spin significantly. As-in I could accelerate from a stop under progressive throttle without spinning out. This is progress. I still couldn’t turn without spinning, but incremental improvement is good.

Moving on to the LSD, this controls how the wheels spin together at the same time and greatly influences grip and traction. As your car turns, the wheel on the outside of the corner has to rotate more than the wheel on the inside of the corner because of the different distances they are traveling. The more the LSD engages the more equally the wheels rotate regardless of which is inside or outside of the corner. This does several things to the grip characteristics of the car. There is the lateral force pushing the car outward away from the direction of the turn, the forward force of acceleration, and braking force. Without any engagement from the LSD the power actually gets transferred to the wheel with the least amount of grip, causing it to spin and break traction. There is a balance between letting that inner wheel turn at a slower rate, and making sure there is power to both wheels to keep peak traction at the limit of grip. Too much engagement and you’ll get massive oversteer in RWD cars and understeer in FWD cars. AWD cars exhibit similar characteristics depending on the setup of the front or rear LSD and whether or not they have a torque vectoring center differential. We’ll cover that later.

That was a long LSD explanation to give you an idea of how it might help your grip tune to change the settings. The initial torque number changes how quickly the wheels start to spin at the same rate. Acceleration and braking sensitivity changes how ‘locked’ the differential is under the respective motion.

Increasing the initial torque will affect grip based on when the LSD initially gets power. Think of it like how you turn on a faucet. The water coming out is the power. The initial torque is how quickly you turn the knob to start the water flow. Acceleration sensitivity is how fast you continue turning the knob until it’s all the way open, and braking sensitivity is how quickly you turn the knob to shut the water off. If you spin it open really fast, a ton of water(power) is going to come out really quick and that will cause the power to flow fast and lock the wheels immediately when you put the throttle on. If you then continue to open it fast, water will flow faster and faster until all the power is coming out full force. This will keep the wheels locked and turning at the same speed. Letting off the throttle is like cutting the water flow by turning the faucet closed, which allows the locking characteristic to release. This isn’t a perfect explanation, but I think it makes sense for our purposes.

If your car’s wheels are spinning out from behind you as you slow to enter a curve, lower the braking sensitivity number in small increments and test. If they spin upon exiting, lower the initial torque, maybe modify the acceleration sensitivity. As a general rule, I set initial torque low on RWD cars – start at 3–5 – and work my way up, and on FWD cars I set it somewhere between 5–10 and adjust up or down depending on how the car behaves. The best way to learn how the LSD settings affect your handling is to pick one setting and put it at one extreme or the other and take it for a drive with gentle throttle application/release.

Tuning for maximum grip from the LSD means finding the balance with a smooth application/release of power to keep the wheels from breaking traction under acceleration and braking. If the wheels have traction, they will maintain grip – which means you won’t oversteer or understeer. Once again, the LSD works in conjunction with the other handling characteristics of the vehicle so changes here will influence other settings, so small adjustments when tuning are best.