GT3 A-spec setups database?

  • Thread starter obx400
  • 28 comments
  • 1,811 views
O

obx400

17
Serbia
Serbia
Hey guys, haven't played for a while, and I returned to GT3 A-Spec recently, and I can't find the site that I used 8 years ago when I played GT3... It was a yellow and black site where people could post their GT3 tunings (I think there was GT4 and 5 there too), there was a bunch of different tunings available, I can't find that anywhere now. It wasn't forum styled, or at least it was a separate section from the forums, it was more styled like a collaborative database, really useful. Anyone can help me what site it was? Was it maybe a section of this site that has since been removed?

Thanks!
 
Might have been GTVault? You can access it from the Wayback Machine here. Sadly most of the links to tuning settings weren't archived through and are now dead. You can try flicking through the Gran Turismo by Numbers forum archives here as well.

Was there something specific you were looking for help with, by the way?
 
Damn man thanks, doesn't look like the site I used back then (I'm mantaining that it was black & yellow layout lol) though it might have gone through redesigns.
Really nice of you to help out and ask for specifics!
Funnily, I'm not playing at my home, I'm playing couple times a week when I go to my brother-in-law's house, he's offering to let me bring the ps2 with me but I always decline because I'd end up playing 10hrs a day. :D

So that means I don't have the access to my save right now, but I just used Nissan Silvia S13 1800cc to beat the last championship in the lowest league level (beginner, right?), and I really had a hard time finding setups for that car, in the end I used a generic setup - lowest ride height possible, spring rates pretty high (maybe around 75-80%), camber like 4.0/2.0, experimented with negative front and back toe which did get some results on corner entry but the car still understeered in longer turns, and both tended to oversteer on exits or throughout more agressive turns and lose speed to drifting. Rollbars are set to 50%, bound is 4, rebound 8, don't remember where I landed in the end with LSD settings, tried different ones... Basically the car is a bit of a mess but I still managed to win the cup by buying supersofts lol.

And when I won that, I got Nissan Skyline, 4wd one, forgot the full model designation, so I'd need setups, for Silvia and for the Skyline, I figure I'll do some more search when I get to play it again :D
Trying to keep it casual because I have other stuff to do and I tend to forget myself when I play gt3 haha

I suppose it's all posted around here somewhere and that I didn't look well enough, so really appreciate taking the time to kindly reply to my message about a 21 year old game. Cheers!


EDIT: Yep, it was GTVault!
Found this link, that's the site I remember :)

GTVault - Setup 4012 - Minolta 88C-V Race Car by Fumes

A website dedicated to the Gran Turismo tuning community. Find strategies for winning races, advice and setups for the Gran Turismo games series.
web.archive.org web.archive.org

Would be cool if there was a dump of all the tunings somewhere...
 
Last edited:
Gt3 is such an old game, are there even any new copies out. Probably not. That game is old school tbh. I beat it only twice my whole entire life. The endurance races were a pain cause you had to drive hundreds of laps, plus it seemed hard to win cause you had to pit every 10-15 laps it seemed like.
 
I'll never forget the trance state that driving 78 laps of Monte Carlo got me into 10 years ago, I kinda loved the endurance races, especially as you could get easy wins by using harder tires and pitting less often than the AIs :D

Edit: My previous message is awaiting mod approval for some reason... Maybe because of the link and the inactive account
 
Last edited:
obx400
Damn man thanks, doesn't look like the site I used back then (I'm mantaining that it was black & yellow layout lol) though it might have gone through redesigns.
Really nice of you to help out and ask for specifics!
Funnily, I'm not playing at my home, I'm playing couple times a week when I go to my brother-in-law's house, he's offering to let me bring the ps2 with me but I always decline because I'd end up playing 10hrs a day. :D

So that means I don't have the access to my save right now, but I just used Nissan Silvia S13 1800cc to beat the last championship in the lowest league level (beginner, right?), and I really had a hard time finding setups for that car, in the end I used a generic setup - lowest ride height possible, spring rates pretty high (maybe around 75-80%), camber like 4.0/2.0, experimented with negative front and back toe which did get some results on corner entry but the car still understeered in longer turns, and both tended to oversteer on exits or throughout more agressive turns and lose speed to drifting. Rollbars are set to 50%, bound is 4, rebound 8, don't remember where I landed in the end with LSD settings, tried different ones... Basically the car is a bit of a mess but I still managed to win the cup by buying supersofts lol.

And when I won that, I got Nissan Skyline, 4wd one, forgot the full model designation, so I'd need setups, for Silvia and for the Skyline, I figure I'll do some more search when I get to play it again :D
Trying to keep it casual because I have other stuff to do and I tend to forget myself when I play gt3 haha

I suppose it's all posted around here somewhere and that I didn't look well enough, so really appreciate taking the time to kindly reply to my message about a 21 year old game. Cheers!


EDIT: Yep, it was GTVault!
Found this link, that's the site I remember :)

GTVault - Setup 4012 - Minolta 88C-V Race Car by Fumes

A website dedicated to the Gran Turismo tuning community. Find strategies for winning races, advice and setups for the Gran Turismo games series.
web.archive.org web.archive.org

Would be cool if there was a dump of all the tunings somewhere...
Click to expand...

No worries, glad you found it. I guess the site went through a CSS change during GT4-era.

Yeah, sounds like your springs and front camber might have been too much. For stuff under 400hp, I usually don't go above 12kg/mm unless the car has some pretty severe power oversteer like a fully-tuned AE86, and 2.0 front camber works well for most cars with medium-slicks. Toe-in does help with corner exit stability from my experience, but I usually only put 0.5 or 1.0 on the rear so the car can still turn well. You can max out the LSD Acceleration and loosen the damper bounds to compensate as well, as the car won't suffer from as much wheelspin.

I'm guessing it was the Nismo R32 S-tune you won? I recommend buying the VCD controller and putting it to 10%. For some reason, the VCD controller greatly boosts the car's stability in this game, even when you move the torque towards the rear. It lets you do crazy stuff like inducing a ton of oversteer (1 bound 10 rebound, 4.00 / 14.00 springs, -2.0 rear toe-out etc.) and the car will still handle well. You can use it to win the two Race of the Red Emblem events and get a ton of prize money and nice cars. Just make sure to put slicks on the front wheels for the Professional league, and mediums on the rear for extra grip.

Edit: Revisiting this a few months later, my tuning advice was way off-base here. The VCD controller indeed boosts the R32's stability, but also makes it understeer on corner entry. What's better to do is, set the front and rear springs as soft as possible (increases body roll, allowing for sharper turning), set the ride height to 130 / 77 for better traction on corner exit, set the bounds to 2, keep the front and rear toe at 0, buy a custom LSD, set each front setting and the rear Decrease to 5 and only adjust the Initial and Acceleration for corner exit stability.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the tips man, I'm gonna try them in the next couple of days and see how it works!

Btw, I don't completely get the last part, what hardness slicks go on the front? Hard slicks? Won't medium slicks on the rear then go bad a lot quicker than the fronts?
 
obx400
Btw, I don't completely get the last part, what hardness slicks go on the front? Hard slicks? Won't medium slicks on the rear then go bad a lot quicker than the fronts?
Click to expand...
I meant hard tyres, yeah, sorry; I got into the habit of calling hard tyres "slicks" because that's what NTSC calls them.

Most cars in GT3 wear out either their front or rear tyres faster. FF's and 4WD's in particular wear out their front tyres quickly while the rear ones stay intact for much longer. Mixing tyre grades helps a lot in winning a lot of races, like the Professional Vitz/Yaris Race where you can put super hards on front and mediums on rear and you can no-pit every race.

The GT-R also benefits from it, especially with the VCD controller as the extra grip from medium tyres will balance out the extra oversteer caused by moving the torque to the rear.
 
The car IS R32, but doesn't say S-tune anywhere... It's Skyline GT-R Vspec II(R32,J)
If you got full tuning setup, shoot, I'm about to set the things you already told me right now :)
 
obx400
The car IS R32, but doesn't say S-tune anywhere... It's Skyline GT-R Vspec II(R32,J)
If you got full tuning setup, shoot, I'm about to set the things you already told me right now :)
Click to expand...
Sorry for the late reply, was caught up in other stuff. Ah, I see, that works too because you can use the R32 to beat 80's Car Cup Amateur to win the Nismo R32 anyway.

I messed around with the settings for the R32 (all upgrades + stage 3 turbo) for a while and settled with this:
springs: 8.0 / 16.0
ride height: 92 / 92
dampers (B): 1 / 1
dampers (R): 10 / 10
camber: 2.0 / 2.5
toe: -1.0 / -2.0
stabilisers: 4 / 6

LSD Initial: 5 / 40
LSD Acceleration: 5 / 10
LSD Decrease: 5 / 40

VCD: 10%
set TCS to 0 or 1
tyres: hard / medium

These are very extreme settings (most RWD's would be incredibly unstable with them), but the VCD controller gives so much stability that the car still handles well.

For the gears, I suggest doing something called the 'gear trick': it makes 1st gear really long so wheelspin is reduced, and the rest of the gears become much closer while still being long enough for high top speeds. Here's a run-through of how to do it:
  1. Move the final gear to the right by holding R1
  2. Move the auto setting slider all the way to the right, then all the way to the left (don’t move the slider after this, or the gears will reset and you’ll have to start over)
  3. Move the final gear all the way to the left by holding L1
  4. Move 1st gear all the way to the left, and 4th and 5th gear all the way to the right
  5. Position 3rd and 2nd gear so the slopes and the start points of each gear ascend smoothly from the previous gear to the next (this is to compensate for loss of revs when gearing up)
  6. Position 6th gear
  7. Press ‘OK’ to save changes
 
Last edited:
Thanks man! Yeah, I did the gear trick, though I noticed that my acceleration from very low speeds (or from the race start) suffers because of rear tires slipping when traction control is off, maybe widening first two gears manually could solve that so that I can keep the traction control on 0..? Gotta try that though I'd hate to mess my gears and having to do the trick again lol
Though I'll compare your advice to the tranny trick I did, maybe there are differences...

Found some setups on GTVault for the V-Spec R32 (sadly, most of the links are down), and I ended up having better results with default settings and also with the VCR not installed...
 
obx400
Thanks man! Yeah, I did the gear trick, though I noticed that my acceleration from very low speeds (or from the race start) suffers because of rear tires slipping when traction control is off, maybe widening first two gears manually could solve that so that I can keep the traction control on 0..? Gotta try that though I'd hate to mess my gears and having to do the trick again lol
Though I'll compare your advice to the tranny trick I did, maybe there are differences...

Found some setups on GTVault for the V-Spec R32 (sadly, most of the links are down), and I ended up having better results with default settings and also with the VCR not installed...
Click to expand...
Sounds like you might not have moved the auto setting slider to the right before moving it left. The game can glitch out and calculate the wrong gear ratios sometimes, and moving the auto setting slider right 'resets' it. It confused me a bit going from GT2 to GT3 as the gear trick is a lot simpler there, but I found some Gran Turismo by Numbers forum posts that explained what was going on.

Interesting that the VCD controller didn't work out for you. I find that the car is much more slippery when it doesn't have the controller, and installing it and setting it to 10% makes the car feel much more stable and glued to the road. Of course, that stability can cause understeer if you don't adjust the suspension afterwards. Toe-out and soft damper bounds are key.
 
Ok, I set everything up and set the transmission according to your instructions. Will I **** my transmission setup up if I move final gears to adjust it according to the needs of the individual tracks?
 
Moving the final gear (or any of the gears really) after using the auto setting slider is fine. It's just the auto setting slider that recalculates the gears and forces you to re-do everything.
 
I used your setup to win the amateur GT Championship and get the GT-One, everything is fine now, though if you have a good setup for it somewhere handy (a link or anything would be fine too, but I'll look it up online too when I get some time for it, I guess I'll have more luck with it than with Silvia and GT-R Vspec II 😆)
Thanks again man :D
 
Last edited:
obx400
I used your setup to win the amateur GT Championship and get the GT-One, everything is fine now, though if you have a good setup for it somewhere handy (a link or anything would be fine too, but I'll look it up online too when I get some time for it, I guess I'll have more luck with it than with Silvia and GT-R Vspec II 😆)
Thanks again man :D
Click to expand...
Sorry again for the delay. I actually never tried tuning the GT-One Road Car before because I always left it stock; that way, it's eligible for the Polyphony Digital Cup (or any event that requires an untuned car). I'm probably too late to tell you that though.

From messing around with it for a few minutes with a stage 1 turbo and all other upgrades, I put this together and I'm quite happy with how it handles:

springs: 20.0 / 15.5
ride height: 55 / 55
dampers (B): 3 / 3
dampers (R): 6 / 4
camber: 2.5 / 3.5
toe: 0.0 / 0.5
stabilisers: 7 / 5

brake balance: 14 / 4

LSD Initial: 40
LSD Acceleration: 30
LSD Decrease: 40

gears: gear trick, use max final gear

downforce: 0.74 / 1.08
set TCS to 0 or 1
tyres: hard / medium-hard

Can go with softer tyres if you want extra grip, but it's manageable as it is IMO. Same for power, but the GT-Ones in this game get very unwieldy with over 1000hp and there's only so much you can do with suspension/LSD tuning.
 
Last edited:
TeaKanji
I'm probably too late to tell you that though.
Click to expand...
Hahaha yes you are! But I can remove the upgrades, right? :)

Thanks, I'll try your setup too, anyway I found that it cuts like butter through most of the races even in default settings... I kinda feel bad to ask for more since you're tuning and testing them yourself? Don't wanna take too much of your time... Or are you pulling them out of a save?

About unwieldy, yeah, it oversteers a bit (in default settings), so I increased the rear downforce a bit and that cured some of the oversteer (I think! XD) and set the transmission, that's all I've done so far, I'll report later when I try your settings :)
 
Last edited:
I'm sorry to say I was quicker with default settings, I found that your setup both understeers and oversteers for me. I don't mean to be ungrateful, but I figured it's better to be honest 🤗

Messed around a bit with different cars and trying to gold the first couple licence tests lol, i guess getting gold on all of them is nearly impossible without the use of a steering wheel (I'm using the Dualshock 2)...

I wonder if there's a cheat that enables you to play with a friend on all those other tracks that are used in the game, instead of just the 3 road tracks, the game feels unfinished in that regard...

Lol you can unlock them, just looked it up, what a noob I am lol
Well, none of my friends ever wanted to play against me so I didn't bother 😆
 
Last edited:
Hmm, okay then. I think this might work out better if I gave you the resources for learning how to tune, rather than us passing around settings that don't work for each other. Shameless self-promotion, but I just put this guide out last night. Hopefully you'll find it useful.

You'll find a video tutorial for getting golds in the B licences as well; it's very much possible with a DualShock 2, but you pretty much need to drive in manual. Reverse shifting (using the reverse button to gear up at high-RPM's) will also help a lot in most tests. I assume you're on PAL, so you have the difficult B-8. Good luck with that one.
 
Haha thanks, I am driving on manual, ofc.

Yeah that was exactly my thinking, better teach me how to fish than gieb me bunch of fishes 😆
But there's so many guides out there, some completely opposing each other, and I'm playing a couple of hours a week (more like 5hrs a week but don't tell anyone), so I was somewhere halfway between learning to do it myself (I get the basics and the physics of it, I did read some of the guides, did some tryouts but don't have much time for experimenting...) and getting the finished ones from someone who are well versed in the subject :)

Still if anyone got Fumes tunings from gtvault, would be great, those are the ones that worked best for my driving style I suppose.

But I'll definitely check out your guide, since your tuning did wonders for my Skyline and also out of respect for you taking the time to answer to my noobish question displaced in time, I'm asking two decades late 😆
Thanks man!

Whoa, just took a glance at your guide, holy ****, you put in a lot of effort! Liked, subbed, gonna start watching it right now, no worries about self-promotion, you're not doing a Raid Shadow Legends themed videos for God's sake hahahahaha
If I'm not overlooking something, this is the only gt3 tuning video guide in existence on yt. There are a couple but they're like "you buy LSD full custom, it let's you adjust LSD, also make sure to buy the sports brakes"

Cheers!

P.S. and yes I'm on PAL, prolly gonna skip the gold licences for the time being 🤣
 
Last edited:
Hehe, glad you appreciate it. Thanks for liking and subscribing.

Yeah, I felt like there was a gap when it comes to in-depth YouTube content about the game. There was a lot of very valuable info that was scattered around the place, and I wanted to put it all in one place that's easily digestible. I guess it's two decades late as well, but hopefully it's still useful for people revisiting the game like yourself and myself.

I think most tuning guides agree on basic things, but they usually word them in different ways and have different priorities. Like, for my own tuning, I usually prioritize the LSD and springs, then tune the dampers afterwards to taste. It took me a while to understand how dampers worked in GT3 because I was so used to playing GT2 and the dampers in that game were broken. I had to rewrite entire sections of the guide multiple times because I realized something didn't work the way I thought it did. I guess it just takes practice, trying different things in Run & Setting to see how the car reacts.

Let me know if you've any questions anyway, I'm not as busy anymore now that the guide and video are done and uploaded.
 
TeaKanji
Let me know if you've any questions anyway, I'm not as busy anymore now that the guide and video are done and uploaded.
Click to expand...
I probably will lol
I might be wrong because we don't have a huge collection of test examples (since I tried only two of your setups), but it might be that the difference of setup preference in GT-One between you and me comes from the fact that I'm more of a trail braker, I like to brake in deep, which is also pretty aggressive braking on the controller since there's no brake pedal travel dosage involved, while it seems to me from your GT-One setup that you like to brake in a straight line before the curve and then take the curve with no brakes and no accelerator until after the apex? Correct me if I'm wrong pls because insight into your driving style would be meaningful in the context of the setups (and also for the sake of hanging out and chitchat lol).
The thing is, while my opinion is that the best is what is the fastest, I'd rather not relearn and adapt my driving too much right now because I'm playing casually and also gamepad is not the best equipment for racing sims so I just want to use the style which is more fun, exciting and forgiving, because there's more margin for error with trail-braking, correcting braking and stearing mid-turn, saving it etc...
But I think it can also be done competently fast if it's not overdone to the point of skidding, missing the apex too much etc.

But when I think of it and think of setting it up, I see how it gets messy with trying to set up the car for trail braking, because if you set it up for early straight line braking - turn in - accelerate style, it's basically divided into three sections with their separate physics "modes" for which you set up the car, and then you're balancing those out, while with braking deep while turning the sections are more overlapped, there are more diagonal forces that are less predictable, and ofc the physics modelling in the game is not perfect (which makes it easier to setup because it's simpler, but makes it more difficult on the other side because you can't do it based on irl physics, because it doesn't adhere to irl physics 100%).

Those were some late night random GT3 thoughts...


I thought of a question, but I'll ask it on your yt video to pump up the comment section :D
 
obx400
I might be wrong because we don't have a huge collection of test examples (since I tried only two of your setups), but it might be that the difference of setup preference in GT-One between you and me comes from the fact that I'm more of a trail braker, I like to brake in deep, which is also pretty aggressive braking on the controller since there's no brake pedal travel dosage involved, while it seems to me from your GT-One setup that you like to brake in a straight line before the curve and then take the curve with no brakes and no accelerator until after the apex? Correct me if I'm wrong pls because insight into your driving style would be meaningful in the context of the setups (and also for the sake of hanging out and chitchat lol).
Click to expand...
Well-observed; I never put much thought into it, but I guess you're right. I usually wait until the last moment to turn into the corner so the car's weight is fully on the front wheels, then I let it fall into the corner while coasting. After that, I wait until I have a clear line out of the corner so I can floor it while the wheels have full grip.

I assume I developed that style from practicing B-8 over and over. For the first sharp turn, you need the GT-R's weight to be balanced while entering and exiting the corner, or it'll skid and you'll lose speed and time. You can see that in 30:37 of the guide: I wait until I'm done braking to turn the car in, so it smoothly accelerates out of the corner. I play on a DualShock, so I'm kind of making up for the fact that I don't have proper analog acceleration controls.

That's why my spring rate, brake balance and LSD Decrease settings are tuned towards stability. For almost all powerful RWD's, I'll max out the front springs, set the brake balance to 14 / 4 and increase the LSD Decrease until the car feels comfortable to turn in without losing grip. Dampers are adjusted afterwards to control how much the car turns. I assume that's what's tripping you up: you're trying to turn in earlier, but these settings are preventing you from doing so.

As for the 'three sections of cornering' bit, yeah, getting that balance right is tricky. Most of the time though, you can resolve any instability issues with the springs and LSD. The main thing is building up the experience to identify any issues that pop up, so you can say to yourself "the rear tyres are losing grip as I let go of the accelerator, I need to increase the LSD Decrease" or likewise. It's a bit of a time investment, but thankfully the experience carries over to other GT games. I'm having a much easier time playing GT4 now that I've learned what each setting does, even if the physics are a little different.

I mean, if your current driving style works for you, then rock it. You'll probably need to play around with the spring rates, dampers (front bound, rear rebound), brake balance and LSD Initial/Decrease by yourself to find the point where the car is easy to turn in, but not to the point where it loses stability.

When I started playing GT3, I favoured cars with looser springs also (most likely due to coming from GT2 where you run a rear bias on almost every car in the game), but as I improved my driving, I felt more in-control while driving with tighter front springs. When I first started writing the F1 car section, my example tune for the F094/S / Polyphony001 was completely different. Pretty sure it had 12.0 / 17.5 springs or something like that. As I used the car in Formula GT and arcade mode though, I realized that the car was just too unstable entering corners, and I gradually kept tightening the car until it was where it is now.

If you want to learn the game's physics though, getting golds in the B licence might be worth the time, even with the difficult B-8.
 
Thanks for the insight, I'll read that again as I experiment... Damn it sucks I couldn't find my old save and see what suited me back then, since I did 100% completion or close (but no golds in licence tests) to it, and I found the save on my PC, ran it in the emulator, but it wasn't the last one, Viper GTS was my strongest car in that one and the game was at about 38%.
The friend whose ps2 it was just threw it away when he was moving, because the cd reader was dead (I used to play from a portable hard drive), the aforementioned portable hard drive died, and the dualshocks died, so he just left it in the place he rented when he moved out, and with it, the memcard with my save on it 🤣
 
Hey again, hopping into this thread because I need to correct myself on something. I realized while playing GT4 that my approach to tuning 4WD springs and dampers for the best turning ability was completely wrong. The rear springs and damper rebounds need to be soft, not stiff. Springs all the way to the left, damper bound and rebound to 1 / 1, and suddenly the car can turn like crazy.

In GT4, setting up 4WD's like this works in multiple ways, because it also greatly reduces wheelspin when the VCD controller is installed. However, I can't decide whether this extra turning ability is a good or a bad thing in GT3. Some cars seem to respond well, but others feel jittery and unstable. Seems like a mix of stiffening the front springs, reducing the toe-out and increasing the rear LSD Acceleration is required.

Something to think about, I guess. You've been pretty honest about my tunes so far; if you get the chance to test this out on the R32, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Might need to re-write some parts of my guide in any case.
 
Thanks for respecting my opinion man, but sadly I don't think I'll be able to play anytime soon, gotta chase the $ more seriously, no time 🤣
But if I do check it, I'll report here :)

It's funny that your stiff rear setup worked well for me, and now you changed your mind on it haha
Probably has a lot to do with driving styles, again...
All the best and keep up the good work!
 
Hehe, no worries, don't let me distract you from the grind. Thanks.

Driving styles do seem to play a role in this one, yeah. I guess if you prefer stability, then stiff rear springs and dampers can help keep the car on the road. For me though, I like to floor it out of a corner as soon as the car will allow, so I try to induce as much turning ability as possible. It does seem to impact corner exit stability though, and I was struggling to beat my lap times for a while until I adjusted my lines. That's kind of why I wanted a second opinion so I don't jump the gun and take back everything I said. No rush though.
 
Back