UC's race events can be broken into two categories that I like to call 'speed' and 'twisty'. Speed races run mainly on the highways and feature lots of long straights and fast, easy turns, while Twisties are tight tracks with lots of turns, braking and cornering. Obviously, you need a different setup for each of these, Speed races are all about top speed, while Twisties are all about acceleration and handling.
Right, so I figure I need to measure top speed and acceleration of all cars. Once the good ones are known, a serious effort to tune them can be made. For both tests I chose the Adder Shortcut checkpoint race in Palm Harbor. This is an open run mainly on the highway with ample space to hit top speed with any car. Also, the start area has some features that make it easy to measure acceleration.
Top Speed Test
To test top speed, I ran the full Adder Shortcut course in each car, taking care to make it a relatively clean run and to follow the same route each time. NOS was freely used. At the end of the run, the top speed was recorded. All speeds are measured in km/h since that's what we use in Australia. Use this handy dandy unit converter if you need to convert to imperial.
Acceleration Test
Right after the Adder Shortcut start line you drive straight through two fences without needing to turn. To test acceleration I simply held the gas floored from the start until the exact point that the car hit the second fence. Then I let the car stop and wait for the checkpoint timer to run down. The top speed reached provides a measure of the car's acceleration. No NOS was used in this testing.
Tuning
Both tests were run with the cars in 'default' tune and 'max' tune. Default tune is simply all max parts fitted and all tuning sliders left centered at the zero position. Max tune for the top speed runs had the engine slider set to maximum horsepower (+10.0), the transmission slider set to maximum top speed (+10.0) and all other sliders at zero. For acceleration tests, max tune was the opposite, with engine set to max torque (-10.0), transmission set to max acceleration (-10.0) and all other sliders zeroed.
Note that while the max acceleration tune I used will (generally) produce the best acceleration from a car, in all likelihood the top speed will be severely limited. When tuning your car, certainly use these tests as a guide, but try to strike a balance between speed and acceleration that suits the track.
Following are a set of posts that show the results of the testing, one for each car tier. I hope y'all find it useful or interesting, or at least well formatted.
), with the more torquey BMW's and true muscle cars bringing up the rear. Don't be too tantalised by the Lexus, it's quite an uninspiring drive with bags of understeer to tune out. However if you were able to tune the handling satsfactorily, the Lexus could be quite the Tier 2 sleeper.
However the Koenigsegg CCX looks promising too.
