Ooooh, I didn't know what this thread was about until I just read it now, but it's an important topic for newcomers to online racing - or like me newcomers to the game and to car/racing games... or cars in general.
I'm only as good with this stuff as I am because my boyfriend knows about cars - he raced auto cross in real life, and has played these games for years, and he's explained a lot of this to me.
But I can't be the only one who just didn't understand how this all works, and how people tune their cars!
It seems EVERYONE online in restricted games without SPECIFIC rules , does the power limiter ballast adder to fit "better" cars into the restrictions. ("better" meaning better performing cars, whether through tuning or just better to begin with).
Unless you do something like the japanese classics race for example where the cars are all stock and only specific cars allowed, which have been tested by the race hosters as being closely competitive.
Taking a road car that comes stock at whatever PP level the restriction is and then leaving it stock or close to, is a way that a really excellent driver can be beat by a total goofball driving like a drunken monkey... IN THE SAME EXACT TYPE CAR.
I'm no expert but there are 2 things involved. Better parts & torque graph hill instead of an X design.
You don't want to take a much higher pp car and add nothing & just power limit down. Because then you're driving a better car, but with lesser tuning parts, then the "lesser" cars are actually better because they have better parts. You want to take a car that's somewhere in the ballpark of the pp you're looking for.
Then you add tuning parts. NOt that I understand all the tuning parts, but from my experience, you just get better performance from the higher value tuning parts. (Under drivetrain, intake, and exhaust)
I tune up, and then I tune down (if that's the right way to put it). So for example if someone's looking to have a car that's going to race at 450pp restriction. They take a car that comes somewhere between 420-480 stock, buy the good tuning parts, then power limit & ballast the pp down.
I get the fully customizable transmission, suspension, and LSD for all my cars. Otherwise, you're losing opportunities to adjust the settings to make the car as well behaved as possible. (which is imperative if the track edge is set to "real"!!) I'm always having to tinker with the ride height, spring rate, transmission top speed, and especially the LSD (especially on antiques and skittery "cheap" cars - ie: anything that's not a modern expensive performance car).
The PP, in my experience, doesn't tell you anything about how the car is really going to perform. It's just a way of filtering out ridiculously better performing higher powered cars from a race.
Because if you have a 450pp car with an X in the torque graph, you're going to be outmaneuvered on hills & out of corners by cars that are even less than 450pp but have the hill design in the torque graph. I've learned from experience you really do NOT want an X criss-cross design in the torque/power graph in the tuning panel!! If you've got an X design in there, the car's not right.
This may seem obvious to people who know a lot about cars (or a lot about tuning video game cars at least)... But that was a complete mystery to me when I started playing.
I found that *I* don't necessarily notice small differences that are a big deal in a race, when test driving the car. So one helpful thing in the game I found is if I go in the practice courses, and save my ghost car. Make my adjustments, then load the ghost, and race my ghost, then watch the replay, and it can be amazing how much the car just corners better, gets up hills quicker, even if it's the SAME horsepower NUMBER and the same weight kg, just with better intake or exhaust parts... (using the power limiter to make it go back to the lower HP again).
That said, there always seems to be one fool who just tinkers with a high performance car so they can have the most torque power & limit down to just squeek into the restriction at 50% power limiter, they basically have ALL-torque, so no matter how much they mess up, the car will pull them out of it.
Frankly, I've used this technique to cheat my way through some a-spec races I wasn't going to enjoy & just wanted to get through. But I would be embarrassed to do this with in races with other real people.
