Alright everyone, this is my "how to" on ratios. I have been making ratios for close to 3 years so your steps and guessing of these numbers will most likely not be as accurate as mine, but do not give up. Follow closely and I will try put the steps as easy as possible to make it easy to follow. I will be making ratios for an odd hp'd car, which will remain anonymous. Here we go then...
Firstly I make sure I have an adjustable gear box installed, which can be found in the suspension/tires category in the parts store on the game or on the used parts lot found by going "sections" tab on the top left. It costs around 3000 points if you get a good deal on it. Once I have that installed we can start making some ratios for our car.
All cars EXCLUDING Dragsters:
I go into "Garage" screen on my game and above the car click on "adjust gear ratios". This lists your current gear ratios of which mine are stock ratios which come with the car they are as follows: 3.12, 2.05, 1.48, 1.16, 0.97, 0.81, 4.1. I'll make a note of these just incase I do have problems with making them as I go. Now I will go for a run at the test track to see how I go with these current gears, noting any improvements I need to make on the way. Hmm, a 0.1100 rt and a et of 9.4220. On my run my launch was good, but possible could be better. There was no lost traction when I launched at full throttle, HOWEVER if there was I would need to go back to my "garage" and click on the "Adjust gear ratios" button and lower my first gear until I stopped losing traction!!! ***A little information on your first and final gear: these are used to determine how quickly you get off the line, too high of number in each will cause you to lose traction while launching, too lower number will cause you to launch slowly and not develop enough speed. Having a good relationship between these will help you get off the line quickly and develop speed*** I also noticed while at the test track my gears were dropping too much so I was unable to gain a lot of speed and was not using the full gears. To solve the slow take off I will raise my first gear from 3.12 to around 3.42. As well as changing my middle gears (2-6) from 2nd: 2.05 to 2.7, 1.48 to 2.2, 1.1 to 1.88, 0.97 to 1.6, and 0.81 to 1.43. We'll see how this goes then. Well, a 0.011 and a 9.392. My take off is much better and I might just raise it a bit more because i'm wanting my first gear to be as high as it can go without losing traction. I did however lose a lot of time because I "ran out of gears" this is because my middle gears are too close together so i'm shifting to quickly and my final gear is bouncing on the redline. We only want 6th gear to finish right when we are about to cross the line, or else we will lose et. My gears now look like the following: 3.49, 2.7, 2.2, 1.84, 1.55, 1.3, 4.1. We'll see how we go with these changed to our ratios by doing another test track run. Very nice, a 0.031 with a 9.296 @ 119.7800 MPH. I did note that my 6th gear was too far away from my 5th gear which makes my car lose a bit of speed, I will need to raise this so I can also finish the race just hitting redline in it. I change it from 1.3 to 1.33. Hopefully this will do the trick. a 0.051 rt with a 9.234 ET @ 120.2150 MPH. You can see my MPH increased because my gear was finishing later, gaining more speed when I raised the gear by .3. My gears are almost ready, I will just need to do a few more tweaking and so on to get the best out of my car, but i'm pleased with my et and MPH I am getting.
If you need anymore help you can feel free to IM me. Or if you can suggest anymore ways I can make things clearer for you and improve my site, feel free to contact me.
Some great tips on ratio making:
**When typing in your ratios click on the "Save" button and then click "Set this car as selected" this will save the ratios automatically in your gear box so they do not reset all the time.
**Make sure you are shifting very close to the redline of your car (this is the maximum your cars revs can go to, which is the best place to shift)
Dragster Ratio Help:
First once again I make sure i have the adjustable gear box installed on my Dragster.
To improve your times in my be something simple such as launching at around 8000RPM, then as soon as you press "A" to shift into first gear you need to raise the accelerator up to full! This method of launching is used in dragsters to have a much higher final gear and then take off quickly without losing traction. This is a must do if you want your dragster running the best times possible!!!
Alright, now for the ratio part of this; I am doing this turtorial with a Top Fuel Dragster, BUT this method can be used for all other dragsters as well. I see my stock ratios as 1.1, 1, 0.8, 0, 0 ,0 and 2.88 final. First I want to have a look at what I run in the track, to see what improvements I need to make and so on. Well; a 0.007 with a 4.762 @300.053 MPH without even touching our ratios, nice. We're aiming for some high 4.5's though. So time for some work; I noticed that I did not slip or lose traction while launching, so my first gear might be able to go up a bit more so I can get more speed off the line, and my 2nd and 3rd gear were a bit to close so I had to shift quickly, and most of the time that ment missing my shift points. So I will now raise my 1st gear and we'll see how that goes. Hmmm, not so good this time, I must have raised my first gear a bit too much, because when launching at 8000RPM and raising my accelerator up to full as quickly as I can I lose traction, so i'll need to lower my first gear until it stops losing traction. a 4.652, getting better now. I noticed that my 2nd and 3rd gear are spaced out a bit more as well. However, while coming up to finish my 3rd (last gear) does not bounce whilst hitting the line. In dragsters this gains a bit more speed, even if it does bounce several times. So i'll raise my 3rd gear up a bit more and see how it affects my time. A bit of an improvement, now i just need to play around with my 3rd gear working with different combinations of how many times it should bounce.
