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Assetto Corsa » Assetto Corsa Evo Car Setups Explained: How To Setup Any Car
Car setups are incredibly important in Assetto Corsa Evo and can provide a lot of extra lap time. Find out how to change your car setup in AC Evo, and what to change in our in-depth setup guide.
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All cars come with a default car setup installed, which has been created by the developers to make the car stable as a baseline. You can customise any car setup for any car, which could improve the handling and speed potential. You do not need to create a custom car setup in Assetto Corsa Evo/ However, as the online servers become more popular and sim racers start competing, a custom car setup can sometimes be the key to putting in faster lap times and competing for wins.
Assetto Corsa Evo is striving to be one of the most realistic driving simulators ever, and features a wide variety of cars from road cars to GT and track cars. No matter which car you jump into, you will have a range of car setup options available to change, and these vary from car to car.
But do you need a custom car setup in Assetto Corsa Evo, and how do you actually go about changing your car setup. In this guide, I’m taking a deep dive look at car setups in AC Evo. I’ll run through every element of changing your car setup and provide tips along the way for what to change to improve your car’s handling and speed.
Below is our Assetto Corsa Evo car setup guide video. This video covers all of the content in this detailed guide, or you can continue reading below.
Before I take a deep dive into car setups, I want to answer some key questions about car setups in Assetto Corsa Evo.
Setting up a track car is vastly different to setting up a road car in both how you approach car setups and what you can change. In a road car such as the Abarth 695 or Audi RS3, you can only make minimal setup changes. This is because more technical setup changes aren’t adjustable in a road car.
After creating a custom car setup, you can save it using the setup presets menu in the bottom right of the setup screen. Click the setup presets button and then create a custom setup by typing a name and saving it.
With the game releasing in early access recently, there are very limited places to find custom car setups. Some content creators are sharing their own car setups, however, as time passes and the game enters its full release in 2025, there will be more car setups available to download.
As of the time of originally writing this guide, Assetto Corsa Evo has only been in early access for a short while. There are a fair few bugs with the game, which are being worked on, as to be expected with an early-access title. This does mean that a lot can change between now and when the game fully releases later in 2025, including physics changes and car setups. This means it is too early to really dive into the car setup meta and suggest too much. However, it is never too early to start familiarising yourself with car setups and the process of creating them, as they can have a big difference in how your car behaves.
With those quick questions out of the way, let’s examine car setups in Assetto Corsa Evo in more detail. I’m going to be using the Porsche 992 GT3 Cup car throughout this guide, as you can change every part of the car with this GT3 car. Some road cars limit what you can change, however, the general process below will remain the same, just in a limited capacity.
The first tab of the car setup menu is the tyre setup, and this part of your car setup can be adjusted for almost all cars, including road cars.
The tyre setup might seem pretty minor. However, your four tyres are the only part of your car in contact with the track. Hopefully anyway, otherwise you’re doing something very wrong! This means that setting the correct tyre pressure, camber, and toe can dramatically adjust how your car feels.
Your tyre pressure is often one of the first parts of your car setup you should be changing. Correcting this can immediately provide more grip or better tyre temperature management depending on the weather conditions. A few rules apply when changing tyre pressures.
You can watch your tyre pressures and temperatures using the hud at the bottom of the screen. The colour indicator shows how hot your tyres are with blue being cold, green being perfect temperature, and orange and red being hot.
You’ll notice, with lower tyre temperatures, heat will generate faster. This can be ideal for wet races where the tyres are being cooled by the standing water, but you may require higher tyre pressures in dry and warm conditions to avoid overheating. If your tyres are too cold or too hot, your grip levels will be sub optimal.
The toe setup dictates the angle of your wheels when viewed from the top. Toe-out will point your tyres away from your car and generally leads to a more responsive car. While toe-in points your tyres in towards the center, and will improve stability.
If you are noticing either instability or too much understeer, adjusting your toe setup can help fix these characteristics. Use our tips below on how to adjust your toe to acheive certain behaviours.
Your camber setup is really similar to your toe in that it adjusts the angle of your tyres. However, camber adjusts the angle when viewed from the front. Negative camber points the tops of the tyres in towards the car and positive camber points the tops away from the car.
Adding negative camber will help with cornering grip as your car can lean onto the surface of the tyre. However, by adding negative camber, you’ll be reducing the contact patch of the tyre which leads to uneven tyre wear and less traction.
Balancing the camber is a game between increasing cornering grip and minimum corner speeds with the lower levels of traction and grip you’ll get when braking and accelerating in a straight line.
Your electronic setup is where you can adjust elements such as your ABS and traction control strength. Some cars such as some varients of the Porsche 992 only include ABS, while others include additional settings. The Ferrari 488 for example includes TC2 as well which affects your traction control.
Many cars include the ability to adjust ABS and traction control settings, with many GT cars using both of these assists in real-world championships. Even if you’re feeling confident in your skill, turning the electronic systems down to 0 won’t make you faster, as some cars rely on them.
Instead, with many track and GT cars, fine tuning the ABS and traction settings will let you push the car to its limits a little more, while providing just enough of an electronic safety net. Generally, you can control these electronic elements while on track if you’ve mapped them to your controller.
The fuel and strategy section of your car setup is where you can change your starting fuel load and your tyre compound. If you’re jumping into a wet race, definitely ensure you have the correct tyre compound selected.
Depending on the car you choose, you’ll have a different set of suspension setup options to choose from. The Porsche 992 that I’m using here has steering ratio aswell as bumpstop rate and range for each corner of the car. However, the Mercedes-AMG GT2 has access to anti-roll bar settings but no control to the bumpstop setup.
Your steering ratio affects the relationship between your steering wheel and car’s wheels. Essentially the number of the steering ratio relates to how many degrees you need to turn the steering wheel to achieve 1° of steering input. Increasing this will slow your steering while lowering it will increase the steering speed.
The bumpstop setup options directly relate to how stiff or soft your suspension is, as well as setting how far it can compress before hitting the stops.
The bumpstop rate setting will affect how stiff the bumpstop feels. Stiffening this will make your car feel a little harsher over bumps and kerbs, and can lead to skittish behaviour if pushed too far. As expected, softening this will reduce the stiffness allowing your car to ride bumps easier and become more stable in general.
The range setting affects the amount of travel within each corner of the car. Increasing this will allow the suspension to travel further before it hits the bumpstop.
However, softening your bumpstop rate and increasing the range will introduce more body roll as your car’s weight shifts. This can lead to your car feeling a little less responsive compared to a suspension that is set up to be stiffer.
Talking of body roll, the anti-roll bar setup option that is available on some cars like the Mercedes-AMG GT2 directly affects the allowance and stiffness of lateral roll.
The ARB setup can have one of the largest impacts on your car’s overall behaviour and drastically affect the tendency to understeer or oversteer into and out of corners. Another consideration is how stiff or soft your front ARBs are set to compared to the rear.
Your damper set up works in relation to your suspension setup and can have similar affects depending on how stiff you set your dampers. These settings give you more detailed control over the speed of your suspension compression and rebound. However, this part of your car setup is possibly one of the most complex to really master.
Each corner of your car has four settings, slow bump, fast bump, slow rebound and fast rebound. The difference between bump and rebound is the direction of suspension travel. The bump setting affects the compression of your damper while the rebound affects the extension or rebound of the damper.
The difference between slow and fast is the behaviour during different frequencies. The slow bump and rebound affects the general behaviour of your dampers, while the fast bump and rebound affect behaviour over harsh bumps, high kerbs and heavy hits.
Below is a table showing how each change affects your car’s damper behaviour.
Setting | Front of the car | Rear of the car |
---|---|---|
Slow Bump | Softer slow bump will increase the speed of the compression, and will cause the front of the car to dip more under braking. | Softening the rear slow bump will allow the car to pitch backwards faster under heavy acceleration, while a stiffer setup slows the speed of compression. |
Slow Rebound | Increasing the stiffness will reduce the speed at which the front of the car raises when accelerating. | Increasing the stiffness reduces the speed of the rear of the car rising up when braking. |
Fast Bump | Softer fast bump values will absorb more of an impact while a stiffer setup will make the car react harsher to big bumps. | Softer fast bump values will absorb more of an impact while a stiffer setup will make the car react harsher to big bumps. |
Fast Rebound | Lowering the fast rebound will let the dampers return to their neutral state faster after a kerb strike. | Lowering the fast rebound will let the dampers return to their neutral state faster after a kerb strike. |
The final area of car setups in Assetto Corsa Evo is the aerodynamics. Here you can directly adjust wing angles along with splitters if your car has any adjustable aero devices. You can also change your ride height which has a pretty big impact on your car’s behaviour including general downforce and drag.
So far, with the cars I’ve driven in the early access, none have adjustable wings or splitter, however, if they did, generally increasing them at the front or rear will increase the amount of downforce generated at that end of the car. This will increase drag and slow the top speed potential, but also provide more downforce through corners.
You can also adjust the relation between understeer and oversteer using the front and rear aero adjustments. Increased front aero will lead to less understeer while increasing the rear aero will give more rear stability.
The ride height affects how close to the track your car sits at both the front and rear. You generally want to lower it as far as you can before you introduce too many negative implications. Setting it too low can lead to excess drag or even bottoming out over kerbs.
As you lower your ride height, you’ll also need to increase the suspension stiffness as the suspension will have less room to travel and compress. You can also adjust the front and rear ride height to affect understeer and oversteer tendencies.
The rear ride height should always be higher than the front, however, the larger this offset, the more oversteer you will naturally introduce. If you are struggling with oversteer, you can try lowering your rear ride height to combat this.
Before I finish this Assetto Corsa Evo setup guide, I want to cover a few common car handling issues and see how we can fix them by making car setup changes. I’m going to run through some common issues and suggest a few adjustments which can help remedy the issue.
As you will have seen in this guide, there are a lot of different areas that you can start to adjust to optimise your car’s setup in Assetto Corsa Evo. It may seem daunting, especially as changing one area will lead to adjustments being required elsewhere.
One final tip is to always re-check and adjust your tyre pressures after big setup changes. The new behaviour of your car will affect your overall grip and tyre temperature, so ensuring they are still within their perfect operating window is important.
Feel free to go back through this guide to each area and play about with making changes to your car. I’d recommend making one or two changes at a time and putting in a few laps to see what difference the changes make. This will let you really feel each change as well as knowing what to revert back to if a certain change doesn’t work as you planned.
With AC Evo currently being in early access, I’ll probably look to update this setup guide video at a later date, but for now, if any changes do happen to the physics or car setups, I’ll pin them in the comments below so you have a central hub to refer back to.
When it comes to actually creating a car setup, you can find the car setup menu in the tabs along the top of the screen after starting any session. To create a custom car setup in AC Evo, follow the steps below.
If you’re racing AC Evo with a racing wheel, check out our recommended wheel settings in the video below. The video runs through the best force feedback and wheel settings for the most popular racing wheels including Fanatec, MOZA Racing, SIMAGIC, Logitech and others.
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Rich is the founder, F1 car setup creator and content writer for SimRacingSetups. With over a decade of experience as a graphic designer, marketing director, competitive sim racer and avid motorsport fan, Rich founded SimRacingSetup.com to share his passion and knowledge of sim racing and Formula 1 with other sim racers. Regularly writes for sim racing website SimRaceReviews.com
View all articles written by RichFind the latest sim racing car setups to always have the advantage on track, with the best ACC car setups, iRacing setups and F1 24 setups.
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These setups are designed to help you improve your lap time and consistency by optimising your car setup for better pace and stability.
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