F1 24: How To Create The Perfect Car Setup

Car setups are an enigma that can be confusing to get your head around. However, when you do, they can unlock that extra bit of lap time needed to put in faster and more consistent laps. In F1 24, we have more car setup options than ever before in an EA F1 game, and this gives us more room to perfect our car setup.

This year has also been pretty controversial with the handling model which has seen significant changes in the 1.3 post-launch patch. Car setups can really transform how your car behaves on track and how much performance you can extract from your car.

In this guide, I’ll explain each part of a car setup and its function. I’ll also show you the step-by-step process that I use to create all of our F1 24 car setups.

By the end of this guide, you should hopefully have a good understanding of how to make car setup changes and the confidence to adjust your car setup to achieve specific results. Its important to note that this setup guide has been created after the big handling patch.

---

F1 24 car setups explained

Before I look at my step-by-step process, I want to explain car setups and how they affect a car’s behaviour. Essentially, a car setup is the combined configuration of each element on your car, from your tyres to your aerodynamics and suspension.

These elements work together to adjust how your car behaves on track. The goal with any car setup in F1 24 is to improve your car’s behavior and, ultimately, your performance.

Different styles of car setup

While performance is normally the key factor when creating a car setup in F1 24, there are other reasons for making adjustments. These could be to make the car easier to drive or kinder to your tyres, allowing them to last longer during a race.

This year, probably more than ever before, there is a big difference between time trial car setups and race setups. An F1 24 time trial car setup is designed for one thing: ultimate single-lap performance.

These styles of car setups are often very biased towards oversteer, and with the current F1 24 meta, the car will be set up to overrotate on the corner entry using tools like the off-throttle differential and engine braking. This results in a car that can feel strange to drive, and in a race will certainly prove to be a handful to control and incredibly hard on tyre wear.

A race car setup is much different. You do still want to aim for good performance, but you will need to account for tyre wear, consistency and aerodynamic performance.

View the best F1 24 car setups designed for various scenarios including races and time trial.

What to change between a time trial and a race car setup

It is often faster across a single lap to set up your front and rear wings with higher downforce. This will normally improve your cornering speed and result in faster lap times.

However, in a race, more downforce can be a negative. Higher wing angles result in slower straight-line speeds, which can make overtaking very hard and make you vulnerable to being overtaken by cars behind you. It is common for a race setup to lower our front and rear aerodynamic setup to make our car more competitive down long straights.

It can also be beneficial to soften our suspension and use a much less aggressive geometry setup. These changes can result in a car that is easier and more consistent to drive lap after lap, and much better on tyre wear. However, after the big handling update, stiffer suspension setups are quickly becoming the norm, even in a race setup.

Watch our full setup creation video

---

Creating an F1 24 car setup: Step-by-step process

Now that I’ve touched on how a car setup can affect your car, I want to jump right into the meat of this guide: our process for creating the best F1 24 car setup for any situation.

I’ll cover each step of our car setup creation process in detail, but first I want to touch on each step quickly. This is perfect for you to reference quickly each time you create a car setup without re-reading our entire guide.

---

The main rule of creating an F1 24 car setups

You may notice in the step-by-step guide above that we only ever change one thing before we complete another practice run. This is because changing multiple parts of your car setup in between practice runs can make it hard to know what was responsible for the new way in which your car is behaving.

For example, say we adjust our aerodynamic setup and our suspension setup at the same time. And this resulted in us putting in a slower lap time than before. We wouldn’t know whether the aero setup or suspension setup changes were responsible for this.

Only changing a single part of your car setup at once gives us very clear indication of whether that change worked or not. This makes it much easier to make informed decisions as you progress through creating your car setup.

Which game mode should you use when creating car setups?

I often get asked which game mode should be used to create F1 car setups. Should they be created in time trial, the perfect scenario with unlimited fresh tyres, or should they be created in a live practice session?

While time trial is a great place to replicate the perfect scenario, creating a car setup in this game mode may not give accurate results. That is because the weather and track are at the perfect temperature, and there is no tyre wear. Both of these things never really occur during a race weekend.

Instead, I recommend loading a Grand Prix weekend and setting the weather clear. This gives you three practice sessions on a dry but not perfect track. You can test all tyre compounds to see if your setup translates well across them all.

If you run out of new tyres while creating a car setup, simply save your in-progress setup. Exit the practice session and start a brand new Grand Prix weekend with the same conditions as before. Then, continue right where you left off.

One very important aspect of creating a car setup is checking your tyre temperatures regularly. You cannot do this during a time trial session, but it is vital to ensuring your car doesn’t burn through tyres too quickly during a race.

---

Step 1 – Initial driveability adjustments

Now, I’m going to take a deeper dive into each step I take while creating a car setup. The first step is always to make a few very quick adjustments to make the car more driveable.

These include setting a normal brake bias, ensuring the brake pressure is set to maximum and adjusting the on-throttle differential. Each of these changes just makes the car more balanced than the default car setup.

Initial car setup changes include;

• Change your brake bias to 55%
• Set your brake pressure to 100%
• Change your on-throttle differential to around 50%

---

Step 2 – First practice run

With those initial changes, you can head out on track for the first time to put in your first practice run. during this run, you will want to complete at least 5 laps, as this is enough time to allow the tyres to reach their maximum temperature.

You should focus on how the car behaves throughout a lap. Is it understeering or oversteering, or do you struggle to apply the throttle without spinning the wheels? These are all things to mentally note down. Also, pay attention to your lap time.

You should also open your MFD and check the tyre temperature throughout a lap towards the end of your run. It is handy to physically note down the temperature of each tyre, as we will use these temperatures to make tyre pressure adjustments.

---

Step 3 – Aerodynamic setup changes

After 5 or so laps, head back into the pits, and we can adjust our car setup. The first thing I always adjust is the aerodynamic setup. This is one of the most impactful areas of your car setup and can dictate how much grip you have through corners and how fast you are at the end of the straights.

Remember how your car behaved during the first practice run? The aerodynamic setup can correct some of the unwanted behaviour through corners. Use the following tips to make an informed decision about adjusting your aerodynamic setup.

• Car understeering: Increase the front wing or reduce the rear wing
• Car oversteering: Increase the rear wing or reduce the front wing
• Too slow on straights: Decrease both front and rear wing (the rear wing has a more significant impact on top speed)
• Too slow around corners: Increase both front and rear wing aero

In F1 24, it is generally better to have a higher front wing angle than the rear. The recommended gap between the two should be between 5 and 15 at most tracks, with a common value of around 10 being generally very good at most circuits.

The perfect aerodynamic car setup gives you enough top speed to be competitive with other cars but also enough downforce so you are fast around corners. Compare your speed through speed traps with other cars or follow them closely down straights to see how your straight-line speed compares.

---

Step 4 – Tyre pressures

After our first setup changes, before heading back out on track, I would adjust our tyre pressures. This change brings each tyre into the correct temperature window to avoid too much wear or too little grip.

Refer to your noted tyre temperatures from your first practice run and adjust the pressures to bring them into the working window. Increasing tyre pressures decreases the temperature, while decreasing pressures will increase the temperature. This is the opposite from last years game.

Below are the recommended tyre temperatures in F1 24.

• Ideal tyre temperatures in F1 24: 85°C – 105°C
• Tyres colder than 85°C: They won’t produce enough grip. Increase tyre pressures
• Tyres hotter than 105°C: They will overheat and wear faster. Decrease tyre pressures

Compound	Min temp	Optimal temp	Max temp
C1	85°C	100°C	120°C
C2	85°C	95°C	115°C
C3	80°C	90°C	110°C
C4	80°C	90°C	105°C
C5	75°C	85°C	105°C

---

Step 5 – Second practice run

With our aerodynamic setup adjusted and our tyre pressures refined, we can head back out on track for another practice run. Select a new set of tyres for a like-for-like comparison with the first run, and head out on track.

Again, complete a minimum of 5 laps, paying attention to how your car handles now. It is also worth comparing your lap times with your previous best, as ultimately, a good car setup should improve your performance.

Also, use this practice session to check your tyres to see if they are closer to the correct temperature range. Don’t worry too much about noting down the tyre temperatures, as we won’t be adjusting them again right away.

---

Step 6 – Suspension setup

After returning to the pits, we will adjust our suspension setup. Much like the aerodynamic setup, our suspension has a big impact on our car’s performance. It will affect how easy or hard your car is to drive and can be used to tweak your car’s preference for oversteer or understeer.

Within our suspension setup screen, we can adjust various elements.

• Front and rear suspension: Stiffens or softens the car, affecting balance and behaviour over kerbs and bumps.
• Front and rear ARBs: The anti-roll bars affect your car’s behaviour while leaning through corners.
• Ride height: Create more or less downforce by adjusting the ride height, which affects stability.

Front and rear suspension

The suspension setup adjusts how soft or stiff your car feels during various moments. Adjusting this can make your car more or less stable, especially over bumps and kerbs. It also affects how the weight shifts under heavy braking and acceleration and how responsive it is.

• Softer suspension: Increases stability but makes your car less responsive.
• Stiffer suspension: Increases responsiveness but also makes car less stable and increases tyre wear.

A trend in F1 24 and previous F1 games is to stiffen the front suspension as much as possible without making your car too hard to drive. Then, the rear suspension should be set up to be very soft in comparison. This will create a car that is very responsive, while the rear remains compliant and stable.

Being too aggressive with this can cause unwanted rear stability and oversteer. If this is the case, you can soften the front suspension or stiffen the rear.

Anti-roll bars (ARBs)

The anti-roll bars work in a similar way to the suspension but affect the lateral stiffness while cornering. Making changes to your ARBs greatly impacts overall responsiveness and stability mid-corner.

• Stiffer anti-roll bars: Increases responsiveness on corner entry but increases instability through longer corners.
• Softer anti-roll bars: More stability through corners but less responsive.
• Stiffer rear ARB/Softer front: Increases rotation, reduces understeer and can result in more oversteer.
• Stiffer front ARB/Softer rear: More stability but increases understeer.

Much like the suspension setup, an offset between front and rear is common, although not normally as extreme. Your ARBs are almost always set with the front ARB stiffer than the rear, promoting stability.

With F1 24, the anti-roll bars will often be set incredibly high, often right up to 21-21. This is the optimal route for most time trial setups, with race setups often softening the rear ARB. This will result in better performance on the corner entry and mid-corner phase.

However, you do need to be cautious at tracks with longer corners like China or Suzuka. Setting your ARBs too stiff can result in the rear of the car being overwhelmed and giving way on you mid corner. To combat this, I often recommend softening the rear ARB or both front and rear ARBs to make your car more stable.

Ride height

The final part of the suspension setup is the ride height. This can affect stability, especially if the setup is too low, causing your car to hit the track or kerbs. You will, however, want to set your ride height to as low as you can without too much contact with the track.

A lower ride height will provide more downforce and is especially important with this new generation of ground-effect Formula 1 cars. Increasing your ride height can make your car more stable but will produce more drag, which slows you down and creates less downforce.

Aim to set the ride height as low as possible until you experience bottoming out or too much contact with the track surface. You can hear this while on track or feel the car become unresponsive. Also, if you notice your top speed suddenly decrease or is much lower than other cars, this could be due to your car rubbing the track too much.

There is an important correlation between ride height and suspension stiffness. The stiffer you set your front and rear suspension, the lower you can set your ride height. This is because stiffer suspension allow less compression and vertical movement than softer suspension. You can experiment with lowering your ride height as you stiffen your suspension.

---

Step 7 – Third practice run

With the suspension setup adjusted, it’s time for another practice run. Like the previous stint, you should compare your overall pace and the car’s stability. If you notice any unwanted understeer, oversteer or general instability, you can return to the pits and rework your suspension setup until you feel comfortable.

---

Step 8 – Suspension geometry

The next part of our car setup to adjust is the suspension geometry. You can adjust the toe and camber at both the front and rear of your car. These adjustments impact your tyre wear and affect responsiveness, stability and drag.

Camber Setup

The camber is the term given to the angle of your tyres when viewed from the front of the car. Formula 1 cars are always set up with the tops of the tyres pointing in. This is negative camber.

The more the tyres lean in at the top, the more potential lateral grip you’ll have while cornering. This is because as your car turns into a corner, the weight shifts to the outside of the car, and it leans on your outside tyres. This causes the tyre angle in relation to the track to change and more of the tyre’s surface to come into contact with the track.

More negative camber provides more potential grip while cornering, but it will also overheat your tyres more mid-corner, resulting in higher tyre temperatures.

One of the key downsides of adding too much negative camber is that it reduces the contact patch with the track when travelling straight. This can limit straight line grip making it easier to lock a wheel under braking or result in lower top speeds compared to a more neutral camber setup.

With pretty much all F1 24 car setups, the performance gain from running the most amount of negative camber will almost always outweigh any potential negative. This results in a camber setup all the way to the left on both front and rear.

The only reason you would move away from this approach is if tyre wear is too much of an issue to manage with other parts of your car setup, or if you are hunting for better traction or braking performance. Although the gains in these two areas won’t often outweigh the potential cornering performance that a left, left camber setup offers.

Toe Setup

Your toe setup is the angle of your tyres when viewed from the top. It is essentially how much your tyres point in or out of the car. Pointing out is called toe out while pointing in is called toe in.

Adjusting the toe angle can affect responsiveness, stability, drag and top speed as well as tyre temperatures.

• More toe out (front tyres): Increases responsiveness, reduces stability, increases drag, increases tyre temperature.
• More toe in (rear tyres): Increases stability, reduces responsiveness, increases drag, increases tyre temperature.

You can use the toe setup to address some unwanted characteristics that may have resulted from other setup changes.

• Car lacks stability: Increase rear toe.
• Car understeers and isn’t responsive when turning: Increase front toe.
• Car is too slow on straights: Reduce front and rear toe.

Much like the camber, in F1 24 it is normally always more beneficial to lower the front and rear toe right down to their minimum values. This will lower drag, and result in higher top speeds. The cars in F1 24 are incredibly pointy and responsive so its often not needed to increase this with higher toe out values.

You may find yourself adding some toe in at the rear of the car at certain tracks to help with stability. Doing this can counter the tendency for your car to step out of line through a corner and can sometimes make the car just that little bit easier to drive.

---

Step 9 – Fourth practice run

Once again, after making these car setup changes, select a new set of tyres and head out on track for another 5-lap practice run. If you are running out of tyres, you can progress to another practice session or restart the Grand Prix weekend after saving your setup in progress.

During this practice run, note down your tyre temperatures once again as we will be making adjustments to them next.

---

Step 10 – Transmission setup

After returning to the pits, we will now adjust the transmission setup. There are new options available to us in F1 24, so we have more control than before.

Both the on and off throttle differential can now be adjusted from 10-100%, while in previous F1 games we were restricted to 50-100%. There is a new option called engine braking.

Each of these setup options lets us change how the car behaves during certain situations.

• On-throttle differential: This controls how locked the rear wheels are under acceleration. Higher values can result in more drive out of faster corners but more wheelspin at slower corners.
• Off-throttle differential: This controls how the car rotates at the entry to a corner. Lower values allow the car to rotate more into corners at slower speed, but setting this too low can result in a car overrotating and generally feeling a bit unstable.
• Engine braking: This affects how much the engine slows the car while not accelerating. Higher values will lead to more ERS regeneration each lap and will slow the car more aggressively when off the throttle, but once again can cause instability and a bit of overrotation.

As a general rule of thumb, lowering the on-throttle differential and off-throttle differential can be beneficial for stability and consistency during a race. A lower on-throttle diff setup can make it easier to find traction at slower speeds but can also affect performance when accelerating out of faster corners. You will ideally want to increase your on-throttle differential as high as you can before you start to struggle with wheel spin and traction at slower speeds.

Lower off throttle differential setups allow your car to rotate into a corner better, counteracting understeer. However, setting this too low can cause over-rotation or instability during the corner.

I would recommend setting your engine braking above 50% at most tracks. This will recover more ERS each lap, although remember that there is a cap to how much ERS you can generate every lap.

There is a big correlation between the off-throttle diff, engine braking, brake bias and your overall braking performance. Setting your off-throttle diff lower, your engine braking higher or your brake bias more rearward will all result in more rotation under braking.

Doing all three of these things will result in a car that feels incredibly unstable on the entry to a corner. You will want to choose which direction you go with and use the other values to balance your car. A lower off-throttle diff, for example, will limit how much engine braking you can run and can require a more forward brake bias.

---

Step 11 – Final tyre pressure adjustments

The last real car setup change we’ll make is to the tyre pressures. Almost all setup changes will impact how hard your car is on your tyres, meaning we need to correct them right at the end of the setup process.

Use the tyre temperatures from your fourth practice run to once again adjust the pressures up or down. If you find that you cannot control your tyre temperatures through your pressures alone, you can make some adjustments to your car setup to improve tyre wear.

• To lower tyre temperatures: Increase tyre pressures, soften your suspension, and reduce toe or camber.
• To increase tyre temperatures: Decrease tyre pressures, stiffen your car, add higher angles or toe and camber.

---

Conclusion

At this stage, you should have a car that is feeling much better than it did at the start. You may not need to make large setup changes compared to the setup you started with, or you may have deviated a lot. Whichever route you take, you should end with a car that feels comfortable and consistent to drive, whilst being fast and competitive.

If you feel that your car is lacking in any area, repeat the steps above to try and solve any issues. It can sometimes take a small tweak to a part of your setup that you adjusted early on to bring everything together.

If you are struggling with creating your own car setup for F1 24, check out our optimised setups for each track. These are an excellent starting point for you to tinker with.

---

---

Frequently asked questions