UPD 21.05.25. I noticed that race springs (adjustable ones) are bad for dirt and CC. They make steering worse (the way I felt it, the car tends to return to its straight trajectory, which messes with its cornering ability). Even if you set toe/camber to zero and the spring height to maximum (that is, same as stock), the result is still worse than with the stock springs. I can't explain why, it's not even an anomaly, but rather a real game bug. Since rally springs are buggy as well (the car falls through the ground), it's best to use stock springs for dirt and CC.

UPD 04.08.25. All C-class tunes where race springs were used were retested with stock springs. Also, I dropped the extra HP with stock tires, STOCK1-STOCK3 now use stock HP. The table now isn't as pretty and uniform as before, but definitely closer to the truth (also, almost all lap times are now better, some of them as much as 1.5 seconds).

UPD. 23.08.25. Added D-class Eldorado.

UPD. 16.10.25. Added S2/X-class Volkswagen #94.

One day a friend of mine, a big fan of FH5, decided to find out which car in the game is the best. And he came up with a simple way to do this: he took a car, then looked for its most popular tunes in different classes and drove it on a track (I think it was Castillo Del Mar, but that's not important). He then wrote down the best result in a file, and pretty soon he created a list of 15-20 cars with the best track time for each car. The list is slowly expanding, and he's quite happy with it.

I really liked his idea, so I wanted to do something similar for FH4. After all, there's still only a handful of such tables, and those that would include the lap times for each car are almost non-existent (I managed to only find one, but, of course, it doesn't have all cars and classes). And yes, you can check the records in the rivals table in the game itself, but you can't trust it because of a bunch of cheaters and inconsistencies in the settings (some people use automatic, some use manual, some use ABS/assist, some don't). Then I started thinking about it... and it was my fatal mistake.

Firstly, I didn't want to rely on other people's tunes with unknown settings. But I couldn't call myself a tuning expert either. What's better: bad tires with more hp, or good tires with a lower speed? More weight (again, with more hp) or less weight (with better handling)? When do I have to use spoilers, and when do I have to avoid them? When is RWD better than AWD? There were no simple and clear answers to these questions anywhere. Then, thinking even harder, I realized that answering these questions in a simple way might not even be possible. Indeed, what's good for one track may be bad for another. There are straight tracks, and there are curvy tracks... This means the question "which car is the best" doesn't have a straight answer. At best, the answer might look like "such-and-such tuning of such-and-such car in such-and-such class is the best on such-and-such track..." And it doesn't sound that cool anymore.

I should've stopped here, but no. To my misfortune, I kept thinking. Okay, maybe I can try to find out in practice which tune is the best in each case? I can start with one car, come up with several tunes for it, then test each tune on several tracks and see what's really better. Nothing too difficult, right? So I chose the first car I came across, Abarth Spider (it's literally the very first car in the autoshow). I created a few C-class tunes for it and started driving. I knew I wasn't an expert racer by a long shot, but logic told me that I didn't need to be the best. It's just enough to be consistent. Then, even if I do screw up, I will screw up everywhere in the same way, so my screw-ups will kind of cancel each other out, and only the objective differences between the tunes remain. Also, rewind can fix everything... And at first everything went awesome... until something terrible happened.

I got better at it.

Yes, it was inevitable: if you keep circling on the same tracks, you'll quickly learn to drive better. But for my goal, it was terrible. The lap times that I already got stopped making sense. I could no longer tell whether I drove faster because the next tune was better than the previous one, or because I was just more skillful this time. So I had to go through the previous tunes again and rewrite the results. Then I started to discover where I could cut some corners. Where the new trajectory allowed me to drive faster than before. And that meant I had to go through all the previous tunes again. And then again... And when I finally managed to finish the C-class (for just one Abarth, let me remind you), after about a month, the procedure turned from "just driving normally, without major screw-ups" to "rewinding each turn twenty times until it's perfect". Any pleasure from the process was lost somewhere at the beginning. The mad dancing of my fingers on the buttons (yes, I play with a keyboard - I never liked controllers) made my hands sore sometimes. But the goal was finally achieved.

I could've stopped at C-class, but I didn't want to waste all the efforts. By then, it was obvious that getting complete results even for a few cars was an impossible task for one person. The problem was that several people (even if there were volunteers) would most likely not have achieved anything solid, for the same reason that I failed to achieve anything at first - different people have different skills and different patience, so it's impossible for everyone to get consistent results together. But I decided to finish at least one car. And it took me (with breaks) another five months. And now I'm looking at what I've got, trying to understand whether it was worth anything or not... Meanwhile, my friend keeps slowly filling his simple list, and he's still having fun. And that makes me wonder: maybe the best car is just the one you have most fun with...

So, after a few first drafts, I eventually came up with a table. Or rather... THE TABLE.



The Table is essentially an insane attempt to brute-force the search for the best tune (and, potentially, as it expands, the best car) by checking all possible tunes (all significantly different, at least) on all possible track types. For the Abarth, this has resulted in 157 lines (i.e. 157 different tunes) for all classes from C to S1. Each tune was tested on six tracks, i.e. there are 942 total lap times ​​in the Table (yes, for just one car). The tracks are as follows:

DRAG - Falcon speedway drag strip (Lego Valley)
Length: 500 meters/yards (0.3 miles).
A typical drag strip, a bit longer than the one at the festival.















ROAD1 - Falcon loop circuit (Lego Valley)
Length: 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles).
As straight as a circuit can be, no sharp turns whatsoever.












ROAD2 - Broadway village circuit
Length: 2.2 kilometers (1.4 miles).
A common-looking circuit with a long straight section and a few sharp turns.










ROAD3 - Horizon festival circuit
Length: 1.4 kilometers (0.9 miles).
This one is quite curvy, it doesn't allow you to gain much speed and cutting corners fast is vital.

















DIRT - Ambleside scramble
Length: 1.4 kilometers (0.9 miles).
A dirt track with no road sections (100% dirt), pretty curvy as well.

















CC - Aerodrome cross country circuit
Length: 2 kilometers (1.2 miles).
A lot straighter than the previous one, but there are some bumps. Also, you have to knock down fences and boxes on the way.










As you can see from the statistics of the poor Abarth, the Table required almost 600 hours and 72,000 kilometers (45,000 miles).





Initially, I used to race against low-difficulty drivatars (so they wouldn't get in the way), but then I switched to rivals (it's more convenient, you're alone on the track, plus you can immediately see how well you're doing by the "shadow" of your rival, rather than guessing until the finish line).



Lap times in each class are given separately for RWD and AWD. The next column after that is the engine (the Abarth has two options here: a stock engine or a turbo rally). The next are tuning parameters. All tunes are sorted by tires, and "inside" each tire there are subtypes sorted by spoilers, namely:

STOCK1 - stock tires, no spoilers,
STOCK2 - stock tires, rear spoiler,
STOCK3 - stock tires, rear and front spoilers,
STREET1 - street tires, no spoilers, etc.

There are other options besides these three; more about them further. Any possible tuning that anyone can think of is guaranteed to fall into one of these categories and will behave roughly the same way.

Next columns:

LAT.Gs - you guessed right, it's lateral Gs. There are two values (for different speeds) on the fine-tuning screen, but the "buy and install" screen only has one:

I honestly don't know how it's obtained from those two, but it seemed more convenient to use here. Roughly speaking, the smaller the number, the worse the car turns (the turning radius is bigger).





WEIGHT - in kilograms (sorry, no pounds for you),
POWER - in horsepower (switching to English system each time to see it was a pain in the butt),
ACCEL. - time to accelerate from 0 to 100 kph (60 mph) in seconds, taken from the fine-tuning screen,
T.SPD - top speed (two columns for kph and mph), measured manually at the main highway when going downhill.

Next, we have lap times in seconds for each track, colored in green-yellow-red (the greener, the better). The values are compared separately for each class (C is not compared with B or A, which is kind of obvious). What these values mean and what I managed to extract from them is written further.

Note: I didn't do any fine-tuning except gear ratios and spring height. All other parameters are left at their default values. For the purpose of the Table, they're not that significant.

Since the Spider cannot exist in D-class, I decided to fill this gap after all. This is one of my favorite cars ever, the Cadillac Eldorado. So what if it drives like a drunken rhino? It's a classic. I think it should come with its own radio station called Elvis, so you could drive and listen to the King all the time.




Best drag: AWD STOCK0.
Best road1: RWD STOCK0.
Best road2: AWD STOCK4.
Best road3: AWD STOCK6.
Best dirt: AWD STOCK6.
Best cross country: AWD STOCK5.

You can only select the stock tires here, or the car will jump into C-class. However, there is a V8 engine option (which seems to be taken from the Viper - at least, it sounds the same). It's not really impressive here, though. The weight reduction is what's truly impressive. As you can see in STOCK4-STOCK6, minus 400 kg (~900 pounds) of weight beats pretty much everything else. Seriously, these tunes don't even have normal brakes.

As for the RWD/AWD choice, it's also obvious. RWD, as usual, is only good on the Falcon. On normal roads, cornering is plain scary, because the car sways its backside like a hippo. Or a barge. AWD can give you at least some stability.

Are spoilers required here? They can help the RWD but it's still inferior. AWD doesn't really need them (except for dirt, maybe... but then again, who would drive such a car on dirt?).

Let's return to the Spider now.



Best drag: AWD STOCK0.
Best road1: RWD STOCK0.
Best road2: AWD SPORT1.
Best road3: AWD SPORT1.
Best dirt: AWD STREET2.
Best cross country: AWD SPORT1.

Lap times for dirt are (naturally) much greener in AWD. CC lap times are generally better in AWD, but not by much. It's mostly because the dirt track is very twisty, while the CC track has only one sharp turn.

STOCK0 is a tune where everything is sacrificed for maximum power. It is the heaviest (with a roll cage), with a bare minimum of other upgrades, which allows you to squeeze 15-20 extra hp in it. This tune is the record-breaker on Falcon (the straightest track), which is to be expected. It's also the only track where RWD is consistently better than AWD (the difference is small in C-class but gets bigger further on). There are two reasons for this: a RWD car turns better (has a smaller turning radius) and has a lower PI (class number), which allows you to add more hp.

You might ask why RWD is worse on other tracks. There are a few reasons, as my experience has shown:

• RWD is less stable on the road and doesn't like sharp movements. With every careless movement, you risk skidding. The higher the class, the worse the stability,
  
• RWD doesn't like accelerating while turning. You also risk skidding, and if the rear wheels suddenly leave the road and hit dirt anywhere, sliding and wheelspin are almost guaranteed. AWD allows you to be more daring, accelerate more and cut corners where RWD would have a hard time,
  
• RWD doesn't like low gears (1st/2nd) while turning, you risk losing control because of the wheelspin (this is more of a problem for higher classes). AWD generally doesn't care,
  
• stock RWD has a clutch with a delay. Even with the maximum transmission upgrades, gears will shift with some delay, and the speed will drop for a split second. Non-stock AWD always has a perfect clutch where gears shift instantly.

The only track where all these factors are completely absent is, you guessed right, the Falcon. There are no sharp turns, no roadside, no gear shifting. So, only the smaller turning radius and more hp remain, nothing else.

Let's move on. What can we say about spoilers? They are not really needed here. With them, the car is easier and more pleasant to drive (especially in RWD), but that's all. A more thorough check has shown that the results with them are almost always worse than without them (in this class). The rear spoiler increases the turning radius (that is, makes steering worse). It gives more stability and less swaying, but it's not really necessary here (except for dirt). Both spoilers improve stability and steering, but at the cost of your average speed.

Which tires are better? Again, it depends on the track. Sport tires could've been better overall, but with them, the car had to be made worse in other places so that it wouldn't jump out of the C-class. That's why street tires show comparable results.
(there was a mention of an "anomaly" where SPORT1 was 0.3 seconds better than SPORT2-3 on ROAD3, but later I got the same difference for almost all other tunes - so yes, spoilers just make it worse here)

Best drag: AWD STOCK0.
Best road1: RWD STOCK0.
Best road2: AWD RACE4.
Best road3: AWD RACE4.
Best dirt: AWD RALLY4.
Best cross country: AWD RALLY4.

In this class, weight reduction becomes available, and I decided to check when "light but slow" is better than "heavy but fast". All tunes with numbers 4-6 have maximum weight reduction. Yes, it made the Table twice as big.

STOCK0 is still the record holder on the Falcon. The time difference between RWD and AWD is growing here, about 0.3 seconds for most tunes. On other road tracks, RWD can still generally compete with AWD (which I kind of felt intuitively before; the B-class was the last one where I didn't mind driving RWD cars in tournaments).

Weight reduction worked in an unexpected (for me, at least) way: except for drag and the Falcon, the lap times for all tires on all tracks are better with it. Consistently and significantly better.

Race tires give the best result by a large margin on ROAD3 (the curvy one) and by a slightly smaller margin on ROAD2. Rally tires, accordingly, break ahead on dirt and CC (race tires, if anyone didn't know, are terrible there).

Spoilers are still more of a convenience than a necessity. It's easier to drive with them (especially in RWD), but with good enough skill, you can get decent results without them. And often even better results than with them. The thing is, the rear spoiler, while reducing the "wobbling" of a car, also increases the turning radius (worse steering). Both spoilers together improve stability and steering, but at the noticeable cost of hp and speed.
(a front spoiler without a rear one only makes the car wobble more, so I didn't test it)

The only place where spoilers unexpectedly help a lot is on a curvy dirt track with RWD (that is, a combination that a reasonable person will most likely never encounter). I don't know if you needed this knowledge, but now you have it.

Best drag: AWD TURBO RALLY DRAG1.
Best road1: RWD TURBO RALLY STOCK0.
Best road2: AWD STOCK RACE1.
Best road3: AWD STOCK RACE3.
Best dirt: AWD STOCK RALLY3.
Best cross country: AWD TURBO RALLY RALLY3.

This class allows you to install a new engine (turbo rally). We already know that weight reduction here is a must, but now there's a question of which engine is better. Therefore, all tunes are duplicated for both engines.

RWD outside the Falcon becomes completely useless. RWD STOCK0 is still a record holder on the Falcon; with stock tires, you can stuff the maximum power into the turbo rally (insane for A-class). Even keeping the RWD car straight becomes difficult (although with rally and race tires it's still decent).

As you noticed, RWD here doesn't have STOCK1, STOCK2 and STREET1 with a stock engine. This is because even with all the possible upgrades of the entire car with these tires, we can't reach A800 (the top of the class). And even I'm not crazy enough to check tunes that are inferior in every way to their neighbors.

Spoilers become a necessity for RWD (if you still want to drive it; the car is hard to control without them) and for AWD with bad tires. There's no point in choosing them here, though.

Rally tires are still the best option for off-road, as are race tires for road. Drag tires finally break ahead in drag (previously, they were hampered by low hp).

Turbo rally is almost completely (except for the Falcon) inferior to the stock engine. It's difficult to tune, and the minimum hp is too high, so you have to increase the weight with race tires. The only exception, which again can only be called an "anomaly", is rally tires with both spoilers and a roll cage (I had to put it there to fit the car into A-class). For some reason, this combination suddenly turns out to be strong. With different tires, or a different engine, or just more weight (instead of the roll cage) it suddenly doesn't work anymore.

Best drag: AWD DRAG1.
Best road1: RWD RACE3.
Best road2: AWD RACE3.
Best road3: AWD RACE3.
Best dirt: AWD RALLY2.
Best cross country: AWD RALLY3.

Turbo rally is the only way to get to S1. RWD is essentially non-existent here. The only RWD tune that can reach S900 is RACE3 with maximum upgrades. It's almost impossible to control the car with it. I'm surprised it still holds the record on the Falcon (if you can keep the car straight all the way).

There's nothing special about AWD: rally tires are good on dirt and CC, race tires are good on the road. Spoilers become a necessity here, too. It's not entirely clear why RALLY3 is slightly worse on dirt than RALLY2 (perhaps it's a skill issue). Even with AWD, the car becomes difficult to control. It feels like Abarth doesn't belong in this class.

To quickly fill the remaining gap and get at least some results for the top classes, I chose this strange beast (Volkswagen #94) with the best handling in the game (that is, the highest lateral G). It has fewer tuning options than even the Warthog. You can't even change the drivetrain (because it's electric). Its entire S2 table fits in two lines, and you can throw in two more for the X. It's hard to say anything about it, since there's nothing to compare it to. The only thing that's clear is that it's quite slow for its class, definitely not suited for straight tracks.



Best drag: AWD STOCK1.
Best road1: AWD STOCK1.
Best road2: AWD STOCK1.
Best road3: AWD STOCK1.
Best dirt: AWD RALLY1.
Best cross country: AWD RALLY1.

(naturally, this strange creature doesn't need rally tires for dirt and CC, they're for winter driving, but comparing summer and winter roads is beyond my capacity)

To show what a comparison of the two cars could look like (without spending another six months on the second car), I decided to choose the Warthog. It's pretty unique since there's almost nothing to tune here. No choice of tires, spoilers, brakes, suspension, weight... almost nothing at all, except for the engine (that is, the turbo and nothing else). It can only reach the top of A-class, so instead of 157 different tunes, there are only 4:



Yes, I tested it with RWD too. In short, RWD is better only on the Falcon (again).

So, if you compare its tunes not with themselves, but with the Abarth tunes in the same A-class, you will get this:



(I've compressed the Abarth part, it's not important here)

Now the colors are quite different. It's clear that the Warthog simply destroys the Abarth off-road but on the other tracks... not really. Again, it's quite obvious, just look at both cars. But, unfortunately, I don't have more interesting examples for you.

Perhaps the only way to complete the Table in the foreseeable future (and make a similar one for FH5 or Motorsport) is an AI. I've seen at least one AI model that can be taught to drive a car in Forza. However, it only drives in first gear and doesn't always hold the road, but that's already something. If someone will be able to create a model that can drive more or less decently (on a human level) and consistently (that is, if you run it 10 times on the same track with the same car, the results will differ by no more than, say, 0.2 seconds), the Table can be completed very quickly. That is, if someone decides that they need it, of course...