SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED Tuning Tips: Sway Bars

Submitted by noodles83 on Wed, 2011-04-13 22:00

Note: This blog is intended to be helpful to those that want to get into tuning in SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED but aren't sure where to start. It will get more advanced as it progresses. If you would like to see certain features in the blog, or have questions you'd like answered, please add them in the comments.

As any driver will tell you, there are (at least) three parts to a corner: The entry / turn-in, the apex, and the exit. What’s great about SHIFT 2 UNLEASHED is that each car reacts differently to corners. In general, you want your car to have the fastest exit speed possible, but some suffer such bad understeer or oversteer that you spend precious time correcting your steering instead of getting back on the accelerator. At the forefront of this issue are the sway bars.

When tuning, adjusting the sway bars can mean the difference between your fastest lap and the gravel trap. There are front and rear sway bars which react differently based on their stiffness. A soft front sway bar will cause oversteer, while a stiff front sway bar will cause understeer. The opposite is true for the rear sway bar. Therefore, by setting both of these to a certain point, you can find a happy medium with your car.

The Need for Speed SHELBY Terlingua Mustang, for example, along with most of the muscle cars in the game, has horrible understeer. Its big, heavy engine  block makes the entry to corners much more difficult, especially on a technical track like Laguna Seca. I knew that setting both sway bars to 0.0 would shoot me right off the track with massive push, while leaving the front at 0.0 and setting the rear at 10.00 would cause the Mustang to act like a drift car. Here’s what I love about tuning: Tiny adjustments can make all the difference. Instead of going overboard as previously stated, I made a small tweak to the front sway bar, softening it from 6.0 to 4.0, and all of a sudden, the car was dialed in. I shed nearly 1.5 seconds off my lap time.

A small car like the Lotus Elise has the opposite issue. Every time I came tearing around the corner, the rear-end felt like it was going to step out on me. I was so busy worrying about oversteer, that I would take each corner much slower than I needed to. The rear sway bar was already pretty soft, but I tried making it even softer (0.0-1.0). The result was a car with great turn-in, and the wheels would just barely stick through the corner, never breaking loose. It felt like I was racing right on the edge through each hairpin, kink, and chicane, which is exactly where I want to be.

The key to sway bars is to make small adjustments, don’t do anything drastic. Heavy muscle cars tend to push while the lighter cars want to fishtail. Make a few small corrections and they’ll all be handling like the well-balanced race car you want.

General Rules:
- Softer front: Oversteer
- Stiffer front: Understeer
- Softer rear: Understeer
- Stiffer rear: Oversteer
- Make small adjustments: No more than 4.0 in either direction
- Heavier cars: Tend to have understeer
- Lighter cars: Generally have lots of oversteer