Tiers 1 to 3 in CSR2: The 136 Cars Everyone Skips

Almost every CSR Racing 2 guide treats the first three tiers as a corridor you walk down on the way to somewhere real. Get through it, the advice goes, and the game starts at Tier 4.

There are 136 cars in Tiers 1 to 3, a tenth of everything on the record sheet, and they behave nothing like the upper tiers. One of them is the tightest field in the entire game. All three return more time for driving well than anything above them. If you are going to spend weeks here, it is worth knowing how they actually work.

Tier 1 is the closest racing in CSR2

Sixteen cars, and the gap from the quickest to the slowest is 0.890 seconds.

Nothing else in the game is that close. The top three Tier 1 cars — a Ford Mustang Boss 302 at Elite Customs level 50 on 11.551, Sneak's Ford Focus TrackST on 11.590 and a Honda Civic 1.5 VTEC on 11.776 — are covered by 0.225 seconds.

The practical consequence is the opposite of everything true at the top of the game. In Tier 5 your car choice decides a great deal and the field spans five and a half seconds. In Tier 1 it barely matters what you drive, because the slowest car available is less than a second off the fastest.

Which is why driving decides these tiers

We measure driving as the gap between the game's dyno prediction and the best real recorded time. It is not evenly distributed:

Put the two findings side by side and the early game has a clear character. The cars are separated by 0.890 seconds. Driving is worth 0.316 seconds. So a driver advantage is worth roughly a third of the entire competitive range of the tier.

At the top of the game that ratio collapses. Tier 5 spans 5.589 seconds and driving returns 0.101. Car and build do almost all the work.

This is why the common advice to rush through the early tiers and start learning later is backwards. The early tiers are where practice pays most, and they are also where mistakes cost you nothing, because the cars are cheap and the races are short.

Tier by tier

Tier 1 is almost a spec series. Sixteen cars, PP spanning eleven points from 349 to 360, and a field under a second wide. Elite Customs is the only real differentiator — the tier leader is a Boss 302 at level 50.

Tier 2 opens up sharply. The spread triples to 3.006 seconds and the PP range widens to 137 points. The leader is a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL at Elite Customs level 50 on 8.273, with a Ferrari 250 GTO at level 50 just behind on 8.315. Both are Elite Customs cars, which tells you where the time is in this tier.

Tier 3 is the first tier that feels like the rest of the game. Eighty-five cars, a 3.196-second spread, and a leader that got there without Elite Customs at all — the Audi RS 3 performance edition on 7.077, with a Toyota GR Yaris second on 7.109.

Stars barely exist down here

Only 33 of the 136 cars in these tiers carry purple stars: 4 in Tier 1, 4 in Tier 2 and 25 in Tier 3. Compare that with Tier 4, where 120 of 242 cars are purple-star, and the top ten of the whole game, where every single car is.

The median star count also climbs with tier: 2 stars in Tier 1, 3 in Tier 2, 4 in Tier 3, 5 in Tiers 4 and 5. So a five-star car means something completely different depending on where you are, and comparing star counts across tiers tells you nothing.

For a player in the lower tiers that is mostly good news. The fusion arms race that defines the top of the game has not started yet, and the fastest cars here are reachable without it.

The one thing that is genuinely harder down here

Fewer cars means fewer options. Tier 1 offers sixteen, against 931 in Tier 5. If the handful of quick cars in your tier are behind events you missed, there is no deep bench to fall back on the way there is higher up.

That is the real argument for moving through these tiers rather than settling in them, and it has nothing to do with the cars being slow. It is simply that the choice narrows, and a narrow choice is harder to work with than a slow one.

What the lower tiers are actually for

• Learn to launch and shift here. A median 0.18 to 0.32 seconds is free, and this is the only part of the game where that is a large share of the field.
• Do not overspend on cars. Tier 1 is 0.890 seconds wide. No purchase in that tier can buy you more than the field is spread.
• Elite Customs decides Tiers 1 and 2. Both tier leaders are level-50 cars. If you want to top these tiers specifically, that is the lever.
• Ignore star counts as a quality signal. They track the tier, not the car.
• Do not compare your time to a higher tier. Race distances differ, so the numbers are not measuring the same thing in either direction.

All 136 cars are in the record database with their tunes, and you can filter the table to any single tier to see the full field.