Re: Help with gearing

Ok I know this may sound like a noob question but can someone give my a explanation on how gearing works particularly when it comes to drag racing I seem to suck at this part of tuning. For example I have an S class dart and I can only manage 10.5 on the 1/4 and from what I have seen on the forums people are getting 9s. I know I can just go buy a tune but I would really like to do it myself and from what I can tell the gearing is what holding me back. In any drag car I have the car wheel spins terribly on launch and I know I'm losing seconds there but just some overall gearing help would be great thanks.

For Drag Racing I Use this website for tuning Gear Ratios, then mess around with it a bit.

www.tciauto.com/.../gear-ratios

If you are tuning a RWD Drag Car go here - www.forzacentral.com/.../37442-heres-some-rwd-drag-racing-tuning-help.html

For Your Final Drive you would want more acceleration e.g 4.98

Then your 1st gear at 3.98

2nd Gear 2.98

3rd gear 1.98

4th gear 0.98

5th - 85

6th - 58

etc. I use this as my base gear ratio and then fine-tune it to my liking.

I got a top 100 Time in a Mustang Cobra & Skyline 2000 GT-R using this base layout (Although i am now in the 1000's due to the dodge Dart Glitch)

If you need anymore help, feel free to ask :)

If its spinning make the gear bigger. Use the least amount of gears

Gear tuning is something I have down to an art/science in FM. A gear ratio tuning "formula" will never net better results than a simple 10 minutes worth of dynamic tuning based on what the car's doing on a track.

-

Understand torque equals acceleration and HP equals top speed. Pay most attention to tuning your first and last gear first. Get on the test track oval to do it. Tune first as low as you can without excessive wheel spin. An AWD car will have a much lower 1st gear than a high HP RWD car for example. Your top gear should be at peak HP when you hit that cars drag limited top speed. Tune all the other gears in between as a progressive "stair step". I tend to prefer slightly shortening my gears as I progress through them. And like one of the other guys said, you don't always have to use all 6 gears. In a really high HP RWD car I've been known to set them up as a 4 speed on occasion. Just depends on the car and the application for which I'm tuning it.

If you want to really get technical, you'll tune the gear ratios based on the track you plan to run. For example, I'll know what gear I want to be in on certain turns and tune accordingly. Further, I'll tune the gears so that the highest gear I'm going to run for the given track is peaking at the end of the longest straight.

Well this was regarding drag racing. In the mile, at least in F3 i used four gears. That way i was always at or near peak power; crossing the line at peak. However, although it doesnt make sense, i found that 3 gears worked better.

And making the first gear big enough to avoid wheelspin just makes it easier to control plus potentially one less shift.

Now for circuit, its a little different. General as outlined above works (each gear an equal division of the whole). Though on some cars with high TQ i'll make large 1-4 and 5-6 will be smaller focusing on peak hp. And vise versa.