How to Read a CSR2 Tune: Nitrous, Final Drive, Tyres

A CSR2 tune is three numbers: nitrous, final drive, and tyre pressure. That is the whole thing. Everything else about a build is parts and fusions, which the tune sits on top of.

The record sheet carries the full tune for 1,308 of the 1,309 cars on it, which means we can stop guessing what the quick runs use and just count. Some of what falls out is obvious. Some of it is not.

Tyre pressure: one setting dominates everything

There are 57 distinct tyre settings across the sheet. One accounts for most of the field on its own.

Nearly seven in ten recorded cars run 0/100 — the extreme end of the slider. Another cluster sits around the middle at 52/48 and 53/47, and a small group runs the opposite extreme at 100/0.

What that pattern says is that tyre pressure is mostly not a fine-tuning dial in practice. The runs that set records overwhelmingly pick an end and commit to it. If you are agonising over three points of tyre pressure, the sheet suggests that is not where your time is.

Final drive: the number that actually tracks the tier

Final drive has 209 distinct values on the sheet, so unlike tyres it genuinely is tuned car by car. But the pattern across tiers is strikingly clean:

Final drive falls steadily as tier rises, from around 3.9 in the bottom two tiers to exactly 2.00 at the median in Tier 5. The full range available is the same at every tier — 2.00 to 5.00 — so this is a choice, not a limit.

The reason is distance. Lower tiers race shorter, so acceleration matters more than top-end and a shorter final drive pays. Tier 5 races longer, the car spends real time at speed, and a long final drive stops you running out of gear. 2.00 is the longest setting available and 516 cars on the sheet use exactly that — 39% of the field.

The practical version: if you are building a Tier 5 car and you have left final drive short because it felt quicker off the line, the record sheet disagrees with you fairly emphatically.

The 0/100 share is not uniform across the game either, which is the clue to what the setting is doing:

Tier 1 is the outlier at 19%, and the share climbs steadily to 73% by Tier 5. The higher the tier, the more the field converges on the same extreme. Tier 1 cars are slow enough and the races short enough that the setting is still genuinely contested; by Tier 5 the question appears to be settled.

Nitrous: the genuinely variable one

Nitrous is recorded as two figures, the power and the duration. There are 404 distinct combinations on the sheet, far more variety than either of the other two settings.

Even so, one setting is unusually common: 188/4.0 appears on 474 cars, over a third of the field. After that the distribution thins out quickly — 473/5.6 on 39 cars, 63/12.0 on 32, 225/4.0 on 30.

That 63/12.0 entry is worth noticing because it is the opposite philosophy: very low power held for twelve seconds rather than a hard hit over four. Both approaches appear on recorded runs. Nitrous is the setting where the sheet genuinely shows disagreement between fast players, which is a reasonable signal that it is the one worth experimenting with on your own car.

Split nitrous into its two halves and the pattern sharpens. On power, 188 appears on 500 cars — nearly two in five. On duration, 4.0 seconds appears on 655 cars, almost exactly half the field. So the common setup is a substantial hit over four seconds, and most variation happens around that.

The exception is worth understanding because it is a genuinely different idea rather than a tweak. 36 cars run a duration of 12.0 seconds, usually paired with very low power such as 63. That is not a boost at all — it is a long, gentle top-up held across most of the run. It appears on cars where a hard hit would simply spin the wheels or arrive at the wrong moment.

If your car is losing time at launch rather than at the top end, the long-burn approach is the thing on this sheet most worth trying, because it is the one place where the recorded data shows two incompatible strategies both producing records.

What the record holders actually run

Take the eight quickest cars in the game and look at their tunes together:

Seven of the eight run exactly the same nitrous. Seven of eight run final drive at exactly 2.00. All eight run 0/100 tyres. The only meaningful deviations in the entire top eight are the SC63 at 2.09 final drive and the Charger at 150/4.0 nitrous.

At the very top of Tier 5 the tune has effectively converged. The cars differ; the settings barely do.

What to do with this

• Start from the sheet, not from scratch. Look your car up, copy the recorded tune, then adjust from there. You are starting at a known-good point rather than guessing.
• If you are in Tier 5, lengthen the final drive before you touch anything else. The median record-setting Tier 5 car runs 2.00.
• Treat tyres as a three-way choice, not a slider. The field clusters hard at 0/100, around 52/48, and at 100/0.
• Experiment with nitrous. It is the one setting where fast players genuinely disagree, which means there is real ground to find.
• Remember the tune is the last few hundredths. The dyno gap across the whole sheet has a median of 0.115 seconds, and that comes from driving, not from settings.

Every tune quoted here is in the record database next to the car it belongs to, along with the time it produced. Search a car name and the full tune is on the row.