How To Tune in Gran Turismo 7: A Detailed GT7 Tuning Guide

Tuning in GT7 is often one of the most daunting parts of Gran Turismo, yet creating car setups is incredibly rewarding. This guide is a complete Gran Turismo 7 tuning guide.

Gran Turismo 7 Settings Sheet

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When it comes to extracting the highest levels of performance out of any car in Gran Turismo 7, the first stop should be the GT7 tuning shop. This is the place where you can add or remove upgrades to your car to increase its performance points (PP).

Then once you’ve upgraded your car and bolted on any new car parts, you can head over to the Gran Turismo 7 car setup screen where you can start to really tinker with your car’s tune. This is the heart of GT7 tuning and is where you will spend most of your time creating GT7 tunes.

This car setup guide will run through the different parts of tuning setups in Gran Turismo 7. I’ll look at the most efficient way of creating GT7 tunes, along with how each aspect of tuning works. And I’ll look at every car setup option in detail to show you exactly what each adjustment does to your car’s performance and handling.

Read our guide on how to upgrade your car in Gran Turismo 7 at the tuning shop.

What are Gran Turismo 7 settings sheets?

The settings sheets in Gran Turismo 7 are the heart of customising and tuning your car. It is here where you can fine-tune every area of your car setup, as long as you have an adjustable part installed.

You can create and save custom GT7 tunes by saving your settings sheets for a particular car. You can even use your settings sheets to adjust the overall PP value of a particular car, moving it up or down classes in preparation for specific events.


How to tune your car in GT7

Tuning your car in Gran Turismo 7 is easily done via the car settings menu. This menu can be found in a couple of ways. Either by looking at your car in your garage, and then selecting the car settings option. Or just before a race, you’ll have the option to once again select a settings sheet or manually adjust your car setup.

GT7 car settings sheets

When you first jump into the settings sheet for a particular car, you may notice some car setup options are not available. This means that you haven’t installed an adjustable part in that area of your car. For example, without a fully customisable transmission, you won’t be able to manually adjust gear ratios.

As you install more upgrade parts at the GT7 tuning shop, more areas become available for you to tune and adjust.

After adjusting any area of a car’s tune in GT7, you should press the measure button to see the results of the car setup changes you have made. This will calculate the changes in your car’s performance giving you a quick indicator of how your adjustments have affected your overall car setup.

Once you are happy with the adjustments that you have made, you can either take your car out on track to see and feel the results of your tune, or you can save your settings sheet so you can easily access it during future events. Saving multiple settings sheets allows you to quickly select different GT7 tunes for different scenarios.

You can create different car tunes for individual tracks. For example, a track like Monza or Spa will require lower downforce levels and higher gear ratios to maximise your performance. Whereas a track like Interlagos will require a more downforce-focused car.

Alternatively, you can create multiple settings sheets for different weathers and events that require your car meet a certain performance point restriction.

Check out the Gran Turismo DD Pro, the official racing wheel for Gran Turismo 7.


What are Gran Turismo 7 performance points?

Performance points (PP) are the lifeblood of car tuning and upgrading in Gran Turismo 7. Every car has a PP rating and it shows the overall performance of that specific car.

Much like other games such as Forza Motorsport has car classes (A class, B class, etc) Gran Turismo 7 uses a car’s PP rating to ensure racing is competitive. Many race events will have a restriction on the PP rating, which will ensure racing is relatively even in terms of car performance.

There are a wide variety of aspects that affect your car’s PP rating, and these areas are upgradable via tuning parts and settings sheets. Elements such as a car’s power, acceleration stats and tyre performance will affect the overall PP rating. As you upgrade your car with better parts, the PP will increase in line with the performance.

By having events that use a restricted PP as an entry requirement, you are often left to tinker with your car to meet this restriction. This could mean removing certain upgrades or focusing on upgrades that matter most for a particular track and removing others.

Read our guide on the best racing wheels for Gran Turismo 7 for our top sim racing wheel picks for GT7.


All GT7 tuning setting explained

Gran Turismo 7 Settings Sheet

Within a car’s settings sheet, you will find a wide range of areas where you can adjust and tune your car setup. These include the following parts of the car;

  • Tyres
  • Suspension
  • Differential Gear
  • Aerodynamics
  • ECU
  • Performance Adjustment
  • Transmission
  • Nitro/Overtake
  • Supercharger
  • Intake & Exhaust
  • Brakes
  • Steering
  • Drivetrain
  • Engine Tuning
  • Bodywork

In this section, I will look at every GT7 tuning option in detail, showing you exactly what each tuning option does in GT7.


Tyres

The tyres tuning option is one of the easiest to manage in GT7. Here you can select the tyre compound for both your front and rear tyres. You can purchase tyre upgrades over at the tuning shop, and apply them here.

Switching between soft, medium and hard tyres will give you different levels of grip and tyre durability. Soft will always be the grippiest but wear quickest, with hard tyres offering the least outright grip but will last for longer durations.

The same applies to comfort, sport and racing. These are different qualities of tyres. Comfort offers the least grip and performance, while racing offers the highest. There are also intermediate and wet tyres available for wet racing conditions.


Suspension tuning

Gran Turismo 7 tuning suspension

The suspension is where you can adjust your ride height along with how stiff or soft certain areas of your suspension are. These adjustments will affect how much body roll you encounter when steering and can also affect your car’s tendency to oversteer or understeer.

Suspension

The first suspension option allows you to choose between the different suspensions that you have purchased in the upgrade shop.

Body height adjustment

This will affect your car’s ride height at both the front and rear. This will affect a few areas such as handling characteristics and top speed. Generally, a lower car will offer higher levels of performance. However too low and your car’s suspension won’t be able to correctly handle any bumps in the track surface and could cause instability.

You will want to test this setting on the specific track you are racing on to find the perfect setup. But the lower you go, the less drag your car has and the higher its top speed potential.

Anti-roll bar

Much like in other racing sims, the anti-roll bar affects how stiff or soft your car is when turning. the anti-roll bar effectively joins both sides of your car together to give more rigidity during corners.

The stiffer your anti-roll bars are set up, the less body roll you will encounter. It is here where you can really tune some characteristics into or out of your car. If you suffer from understeer on corner entry you could stiffen the rear anti-roll bar, or soften the front. Then reverse this if you are suffering from oversteer coming out of corners.

Damping ratio (compression and expansion)

The damping ratio is a tricky setup option to configure. It essentially affects how quickly your dampers will react under compression or expansion.

The compression damping ratio will affect how your car’s springs react when compressed, or when you hit a bump or kerb. The higher the value, the slower your dampers will be compressed.

The rebound damping ratio affects your springs when they are rebounding. This means when they are returning to a normal state after being compressed, or if your car’s tyre leaves the track circuit. Higher values once again make the rebound slower.

Both compression and expansion will also affect how much a car rolls during cornering. Much like the anti-roll bars, your dampers can drastically affect how your car handles around a track. You should look at the dampers to control understeer and oversteer along with your anti-roll bars.

Both of your damping ratios should be relatively similar. Too much of each value when compared to the other will induce tricky handling characteristics such as excess understeer or oversteer.

Natural Frequency – Front/Rear

The natural frequency is a reflection of the quality of the support that the suspension offers. Think of it as a setup option that affects how good the ride feels. Higher values produce a stiffer ride quality, and lower values produce a softer, more comfortable ride.

Generally, higher downforce cars or those with a lot of grip will benefit from a higher value of natural frequency both front and rear. This will produce a stiffer ride which will benefit cars that rely heavily on downforce and high cornering speeds.

But always try to match the front a rear natural frequency or keep them relatively close.

Negative camber angle

The amount of negative camber a tyre has affects its angle with the ground. The more negative camber you introduce, the more angled the wheel will be, with the top side of the tyres being closer than the bottom. This means a car is riding more on the inside of the tyre than the outside.

Negative camber works to give you more stability and grip when cornering. As you roll your car into a corner, the car will lean on the outside tyres. As the car leans, the angle of the tyres changes meaning more of the tyre’s surface comes into contact with the track surface.

If you had zero negative camber, as your car leans on the tyre, you will start leaning on the outside of the tyre with the inner tyre coming away from the track surface, resulting in less grip.

There is a balance to be found with negative camber. Too much negative camber will result in a tyre that never fully reaches its maximum grip which will, in turn, result in less grip when racing.

Drifting car setups often include higher levels of negative camber as the car leans heavily on the tyre at high speed.

Toe Angle

The toe angle works in a similar way to the camber, however, it affects the angle of your tyre when looking from above. Toe-in means that the front of your tyres are pointing into each other, while toe-out means the fronts are pointing away from each other.

Cars will often be set up with toe-out as this produces a car that is more responsive. However, too much toe-out will result in a twitchy car with a tendency to oversteer and be harder to drive.  Toe-in will result in a more stable car, but one with a tendency to understeer.


Differential Gear tuning

Gran Turismo 7 tuning differential

Differential

The differential dropdown will allow you to choose between any of the differentials which you have purchased in the tuning shop. A fully customised LSD (limited-slip differential) will give you maximum control over your differential tuning.


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A differential will help your car manage the power created by the engine. A limited-slip diff can affect how much torque is sent to each wheel along an axel. This will affect elements such as your overall acceleration and how easy it is to break traction. But It’ll also affect how responsive your car is when turning into a corner.

Initial torque

The initial torque setting in Gran Turismo 7 will change how responsive your differential is to the torque input. This can allow more torque through the diff and into your wheels.

Acceleration sensitivity

The acceleration sensitivity is very similar to the on-throttle differential setting found in the Codemasters F1 games. This will directly affect how your car behaves under acceleration.

Higher values here will increase the amount of torque delivered to your wheels under acceleration. This can give you more direct acceleration potential but will make breaking traction easier, potentially resulting in a car that has a tendency to spin its rear wheels under acceleration.

Braking sensitivity

The braking sensitivity is very similar to the acceleration sensitivity above but affects your car’s behaviour under braking. Higher values can result in a car that is more understeer-prone.

Torque-vectoring center differential

Torque-vectoring can be enabled or disabled in the settings sheet.

Front/rear torque distribution

This determines whether your car’s LSD can directly control how much power is sent to the front or rear axle and is almost always beneficial when enabled. You will often find this in real-world four-wheel drive cars to affect its handling characteristics.

For example, you can send 100% of the power to the rear axle making it rear-wheel drive. Or you can send some or all to the front axle resulting in a front-wheel-drive car.


Aerodynamic tuning

Gran Turismo 7 tuning aerodynamics

The downforce setting in Gran Turismo 7 will change how much downforce you tune into your car. More downforce will result in better handling around corners but a lower top speed. While lower amounts of downforce will result in higher top speeds at the expense of handling.

You can independently change your front and rear downforce levels to give more or less prominence towards understeer or oversteer. More downforce at the rear will promote understeer, while more at the front will promote oversteer.


ECU tuning

The ECU option lets you select which ECU you want to install. Full control computer will give you direct control over your ECU, allowing you to adjust the engine output.

Output adjustment

Output adjustment is a fantastic way of limiting your car’s output to adhere to PP restrictions at events. You can lower your output which will essentially restrict your car’s engine output.


Performance adjustments

Gran Turismo 7 tuning Performance adjustment

The performance adjustment will allow you to adjust a variety of options regarding ballast and power restrictions. These will work to lower your PP allowing you to run in PP restricted events. Ballast will also allow you to adjust your car’s front to rear weight balance.

Ballast

You can add weight ballast to your car to make it heavier. This will reduce the overall PP and allow you to meet certain weight restrictions if you are racing a lightweight car.

Ballast positioning

The position of your ballast can have a strong effect on your car’s balance. This moves the balance frontward or rearward allowing you to change the weight balance. Car manufacturers and racing teams aim for a 50:50 weight balance, as this is generally considered the ideal setup.

Power restrictor

Much like the ECU, a power restrictor will directly reduce your car’s power output. This can work towards lowering your car’s PP rating.


Transmission tuning

Gran Turismo 7 tuning transmission

You can choose between any transmission that you have purchased at the tuning shop. A fully customisable transmission will allow you to directly adjust your gear ratios.

Top speed

Your top speed setting is a general option that will adjust all of your gear ratios to meet the top speed that you specify.

Manual adjustment

This is where you can individually adjust each gear ratio. You can adjust these to give you full control over your acceleration characteristics as well as your top speed.

This is an advanced tuning option in GT7 and is only recommended if you are confident in tuning. By incorrectly configuring your gear ratios, you can hamper your acceleration and top speed.


Nitro/Overtake

You can select between certain nitro systems if you have purchased any in the tuning shop.

Output adjustment

Adjusting the output adjustment will affect how much nitro is deployed within a set time frame. More power will result in a sharper speed boost but will drain your nitrous oxide tank faster. Be sure to tune this option to give you the best benefit across the race distance you are racing at.


Superchargers

You can choose to install a turbocharger or supercharger on your car if you have purchased one in the tuning shop. These can add large amounts of power to your car.

Turbocharger

You can choose to add a variety of turbochargers including low-RPM and high-RPM models. These will provide extra power at different rev ranges.

Anti-lag system

You can enable or disable anti-lag here. Anti-lag will remove the typical turbo-lag that is found in turbo-charged cars. Instead of having to wait for a delay between accelerating and turbocharger kicking in, anti-lag will produce power almost instantly.

Intercooler

You can install a variety of intercoolers to work alongside your turbocharger for increased power output.

Supercharger

A supercharger introduces extra power output differently to a turbocharger. Superchargers are always spinning, making power delivery more instant across a wider rev range.


Intake & exhaust

Using the air cleaner, muffler and exhaust manifold selections you can choose to install or remove an upgraded part purchased from the tuning shop. These options will affect the power output of your car, with sports and racing options providing more power gains compared to normal parts.


Brake tuning

Using the brake system, brake pads, handbrake and brake balance selectors, you can choose to install upgraded parts. Again, racing parts will almost always outperform normal parts, with sports upgrades sitting in the middle.

Handbrake torque

If you have installed the hydraulic handbrake, you can adjust how much braking force is applied to your rear wheels when you apply the handbrake. This is a tuning option in Gran Turismo 7 that is generally used during rally and drift events to control how effectively your rear wheels will lock when applied.

Front/rear balance

The brake balance is a vital tuning option and one which should always be considered when creating a car set up in Gran Turismo 7. It directly affects how much braking force is sent to your front and rear brakes.

This will change how your car behaves when the brakes are applied and can result in understeer or oversteer when applying the brakes.

More frontward brake balance will increase the overall braking performance but will introduce extra understeer tendencies as well as make front wheel lockups more common.

A rearward brake balance will send more braking force to the rear wheels. This can introduce oversteer when braking and cause the rear brakes to lock. This is a very strange sensation and could cause instability under braking. However, it is great at reducing front wheel locking and minimising understeer on corner entry.


Steering

The steering tuning options in GT7 can alter the steering characteristics by allowing your car to use all four wheels to steer. This can make turning more responsive in some scenarios, but too much rear steering angle can drastically affect your car’s stability. Only use these settings in certain scenarios, and are often best left set to normal.


Drivetrain

Both the clutch & flywheel and the propeller shaft selections are used to choose between parts that have been purchased at the tuning shop. Upgraded parts here can affect the speed of your gear shifts as well as reducing the weight of your car. The more advanced a part is the better your car’s performance and weight will be.


Engine tuning

Although you can’t directly change your engine tuning settings here, you can see which performance parts have been installed to your engine. To change these settings, head back to the tuning shop to purchase more upgrades. If you want to refresh your engine to an OEM state, you can purchase a completely new engine.


Bodywork

Much like the engine tuning above, the bodywork section allows you to see which body modifications have been made via the tuning shop. These include the 5 stages of weight reduction as well as increased body rigidity.

You can also purchase a new body over at the tuning shop if you want to reset these options.


Can I use a GT7 tuning calculator?

If you find that car tuning in Gran Turismo 7 isn’t something that you’re enjoying, you can look at alternative ways to find good tunes in GT7. One of the best ways to find GT7 tunes is to use a GT7 tuning calculator.

This style of tuning asks you a few questions based on the car you’re tuning and what parts you have installed. Then, the GT7 tuning calculator will automatically calculate the best car setup for your car. From there, you can copy across the recommended car setup from the tuning calculator into Gran Turismo 7.

Tuning calculators can be hit and miss producing a range of results. Often, they will produce GT7 tunes that are very good and let you be more competitive on track. Other times, the results may not lead to a car setup that performs overly well.

I would recommend using GT7 tuning calculators as a base car setup. From there, I would always recommend you run through various aspects of the car setup, using our guide above to make some changes. Tuning your own car in Gran Turismo 7 is incredibly rewarding, and it allows you to fix any issues with your GT7 tune that may be present.


The best racing wheels for Gran Turismo 7

If you are looking for recommendations for the best racing wheel for Gran Turismo 7, we have a complete guide for that. We look at and recommend the best racing wheels for GT7 at a range of budgets.

If you don’t fancy reading our guide, below is an overview of the three best GT7 racing wheels across three different budgets. The Thrustmaster T248 is a fantastic pick at the more budget-focused end of racing wheels. While the Logitech G923 is also an amazing all-round racing wheel which competes directly with the Thrustmaster T248.

If you’re looking for the best direct drive racing wheel for Gran Turismo 7, the Fanatec GT DD Pro is one of the best choices. It comes bundled with an official Gran Turismo licensed steering wheel and a set of pedals to create a complete sim racing bundle. Alternatively, you can purchase the GT DD Pro wheel individually and then choose whichever steering wheel and pedal you fancy.

High-end

Fanatec GT DD Pro

All-round

Logitech G923

Great value

Thrustmaster T248

Fanatec GT DD Pro
Logitech G923
Thrustmaster T248
  • Direct drive

  • €/$599.95

  • Performance on a budget

  • £/$299.95

  • Quality FFB, Good Price

  • £/$299.95

Check out our guide on the best racing wheel for Gran Turismo 7.


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Article written by Mjolnir

Mjolnir is one of the main setup creators and content writers for SimRacingSetups. He has had years of experience in sim racing, both competitively and casually. After a decade of sim racing experience, he co-founded SimRacingSetup.com to share his passion and knowledge of sim racing and Formula 1 with other sim racers.
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