If you’ve spent any amount of time on the PCR forums or subreddit, you’ve seen posts asking for tunes. It’s not hard to find a good tune, but it’s far more rewarding to create a record-breaking tune yourself. With this post, I thought I would share a basic How-To for newcomers and seasoned players alike. Please note, this guide was written for cars that have been fully upgraded (VR swap, T60E 24K turbo, etc), and assumes you are running on Amateur Mode, launching from neutral with Nos.

To understand what makes a tune good, we need understand two things:

Why dyno runs are importantHow gears workTo get started, take your car for a dyno run with Nos engaged, take a look at the graph, and note the peak power details.



Looking at the graph, it’s easy to see where the most power is made, between roughly 8900 and redline. Write down the RPM where your car makes its peak HP and TQ. In the case of my Mini, it’s making a healthy 3016HP @ 9105RPM and 1483TQ @ 8960RPM, with a redline of 10200RPM. Next up, let’s take a look at gearing.



Gearing in a car can be tuned for one of two things: acceleration, or top speed. If the gear is “short,” the number is high and the acceleration in that gear is higher. If the gear is “long,” the number is lower and the top speed is higher. The final drive settings will determine whether the overall priority is acceleration (high number) or top speed (low number).

Let’s do a baseline quarter-mile run to see how we do without touching the gearing.



After a few attempts, the best time I was able to clock with stock gears was 6.561 seconds. If you look at the leaderboards for quarter-mile racing, this doesn’t even get us into the top 200. The top 25 are under 6.069, nearly half a second faster than us. Let’s see how close we can get.

To get faster, we need to look at those peak dyno numbers from earlier. To make your car as fast as hypothetically possible, we need it to adjust the gears so it launches at the right RPM, and lands on the right RPM when we change gears. We want our car to launch from neutral and change gears as close to our peak numbers as possible.

When we launch from neutral into first, the car immediately bangs off of the rev limiter, slowing us down. This indicates our gear is too short. At this point, you can either begin by decreasing the first gear, or by decreasing the final gear. Personally, I prefer to first decrease the final gear, then adjust the first gear accordingly. After adjusting only the final gear from 3.55 to 2.75, I was able to decrease my time by nearly 0.100 seconds.

Once you’ve reached a first gear & final drive that launches from neutral to around 8900RPM, begin adjusting the other gears until they land at the same point. With a polished tune, you should be able to get under 6.099 seconds.

Good luck!