Tier 4 in CSR2: 242 Cars and a 6.6-Second Spread

Tier 4 is where most CSR Racing 2 players spend the long middle of the game, and it is the tier the guides treat worst. It gets covered as a waiting room on the way to Tier 5. The data says it is the most interesting tier in the game to actually race in.

There are 242 cars in the tier on the record sheet, 232 of them with a recorded time. Here is what those 232 show.

The widest field in the game

The quickest recorded car here is the Ford Mustang Dark Horse at 9.352. The slowest is Kurtz's Ford Mustang HPE750 at 16.012.

That is a spread of 6.660 seconds inside a single tier. For comparison, the entire top ten of the whole game fits inside 0.074 seconds. Tier 4 contains cars that are, functionally, not playing the same game as each other.

The median time is 10.285 seconds, against 7.353 in Tier 5. So the typical car here is nearly three seconds off the typical Tier 5 car — which is why comparing a time across tiers is meaningless, and why we never rank the two together.

The practical consequence is that car choice matters more here than anywhere else in the game. In Tier 5 the field is compressed and picking a slightly worse car costs you a few hundredths. Here, picking badly can cost you six seconds. You will lose races you had no chance in, and no amount of driving fixes it.

But the top of Tier 4 is as tight as anywhere

The ten quickest are covered by 0.196 seconds — a slightly wider band than Tier 5's top ten, but the same shape. The field is enormously spread overall and razor thin at the front.

The leader has less PP than everyone behind it

Look at the PP column. The Mustang Dark Horse wins Tier 4 on 669 PP. Every one of the nine cars behind it records 673.

This is the single cleanest demonstration in the game that PP does not predict speed. The quickest car in the tier carries four fewer performance points than the entire chasing pack, and beats all of them. If PP measured how fast a car is, that could not happen.

EVO behaves a little better but still breaks down. The Dark Horse leads on 2,211, which is the highest in the ten — so far so good. But the Audi RS 6 Avant GT finishes eighth on 1,880 EVO, ahead of cars carrying over a hundred more. Within the top ten, EVO is a hint rather than an answer.

This tier rewards driving more than any other

This is the finding that should change how you play it. The median car here beats its dyno prediction by 0.1775 seconds. Across the whole sheet, all tiers together, the median is 0.115.

So a car in this tier typically hands back about 50% more time to a good driver than the average car in the game. And the extremes are far more extreme: the Dodge Viper ACR records a dyno of 13.583 and a real time of 11.740, finding 1.843 seconds. That is the largest dyno gap anywhere in CSR2, in any tier.

In the top ten above, the two Audi RS 6 Avant GTs give back 0.462 and 0.468 seconds — more than five times what the outright record holder in Tier 5 finds. These are cars where shift timing genuinely decides the race.

Put the two findings together and a clear strategy falls out. Car choice decides whether you are in the fight at all, because the field is six seconds wide. Once you are in the fight, driving decides it, because the top ten is two tenths wide and the cars hand back two tenths to good shifting.

How big Tier 4 actually is

The tier holds 242 of the 1,309 recorded cars — 18% of the game. That makes it comfortably the second largest tier, and larger than Tiers 1, 2 and 3 put together, which come to 136 cars between them.

So the two tiers that matter numerically are 4 and 5, and they account for 90% of everything on the sheet. Tier 3 and below is a rounding error by comparison — which is the same conclusion the Tier 5 analysis reaches from the other direction.

What makes Tier 4 different from Tier 5 is not size, it is shape. Tier 5 has 931 cars packed into a narrow band of times. This one has a quarter as many, spread across six and a half seconds. You can be competitive in Tier 5 with almost any end-game car and good driving. In Tier 4 you cannot.

Electric cars run the front

Four of the top ten are Hyundai IONIQs — two 5 Ns and two 6 Ns, appearing twice each at different star ratings. Add the Audi RS 6 Avant GT twice and six of the ten fastest Tier 4 cars come from two manufacturers.

Half the field carries purple stars: 120 of the 242 cars. That is a much lower proportion than the top of Tier 5, where every car in the top ten is purple-star, so there is still real ground to be made up through fusion in this tier.

What to do in Tier 4

• Check the car before you build it. A six-second spread means a bad choice cannot be driven around. Look the car up first.
• Do not judge by PP. The tier leader has the lowest PP in the top ten. The tier runs 546 to 676 PP and the figure barely tracks speed.
• Practise launches and shifts here specifically. Tier 4 returns a median 0.177 seconds to driving, half again more than the game average.
• Favour the big-gap cars if you drive well. An Audi RS 6 Avant GT finding 0.46 seconds is a different car in good hands than in bad.
• Fusion still pays. Only half the tier is purple-star, so the ceiling has not been reached across the field the way it has at the top of Tier 5.

All 242 of them are in the record database with their tunes, and you can filter the table to Tier 4 and sort by dyno gap to find the cars that reward driving most.