The Rivals event in Forza Horizon 5 is one of only many ways to compete with actual players in-game. The Rivals event is a time-attack race where players seek to beat out one another’s ghost.
Like most car enthusiasts, you might have a car that you absolutely love, and would like to find out the tuning limits of the stock car. The Rivals race, in this case, is a great yardstick to find out just how fast you and your car are versus other players.
The Mazda RX-7 has one of the most competitive chassis packages in Forza Horizon 5. The fully-tuned Mazda RX-7 sits in Rank S1 and competes with most supercars in the category, such as the blazing-fast Porsche 911 GT2 and the Ferarri 488 Pista. Considering the humble beginnings of the RX-7 in terms of power output, it is amazing to think how the RX-7 chassis can be competitive and even beat out more powerful and more expensive supercars.
Today we take the RX-7 chassis even further with a very competitive suspension tune that will surely help you place higher on the Rivals Leaderboards.
Rivals Race in Forza Horizon 5
The Rivals races in Forza Horizon 5 pits players against one another through the use of a “ghost” car. Anyone who has played any of the Need For Speed, Gran Turismo, and Forza Horizon series will know that the “ghost” car is just a representation of the time-setting player’s car and lap time.
The Ghost car is a great way to discover new racing lines throughout the current circuit you are trying to set your best time on, as the ghost car accurately follows the lines and braking zones that the actual time-setter used to achieve a specific lap time.
The Rivals race features a community leaderboard that shows Forza Horizon 5’s fastest lap times for the specific race event. The type of car and the driver assists that the players used to complete their fastest lap are shown as well.
This Forza Horizon 5 event is the best place to try out various tuning setups for your cars. The Ghost and Leaderboard feature is a great way to gauge just how fast you and your car currently are together.
Mazda RX-7
Mazda’s RX-7 is one of the most sought-after 90s JDM cars in the world. The RX-7 featured a very streamlined design with the mandatory 90s pop-up headlight system. 30 years later, the RX-7 still looks super sexy and timeless, much like most of the 90s sports cars.
Out of all of the 90s era Japanese sports cars, though, the Mazda RX-7 had the most unique engine type. It might even have the most unique engine ever put into any car in history.
The Mazda RX-7 featured a 1.3-liter Wankel turbocharged engine that produced a claimed 276-horsepower, which we all know by now to be a big fat lie from Japanese car manufacturers. Now you might be wondering how a small turbocharged engine can produce 276 ponies, and we do too.
Any mass-produced four-cylinder engine will have anywhere from 100-200 horsepower at max. These power figures are achievable numbers with engine displacements ranging from 1.6-liters to 2.0-liters. However, squeezing the same amount of power from a four-banger isn’t possible without the use of a forced-induction turbine or a belt-driven supercharger.
The Mazda RX-7 is special because it didn’t use pistons to drive the crankshaft. Instead, the Mazda sports car used a Triangle-shaped block that spun around a crankshaft. This “piston” design was called a rotor because of the way it spins around the combustion chamber. The Rotor’s shape and surface area helped the rotor-driven RX-7 engine produce comparable power to the typical cylindrical piston in a smaller package.
Mazda’s 90s sports car also featured a very lightweight RWD body that offered exceptional handling characteristics. Many auto journalists from the time raved at how amazing the RX-7’s overall balance was.
Mazda RX-7 Spirit R in Forza Horizon 5
The Spirit R was one of the last hurrah models in the long RX-7 line, which was discontinued in 2002. The Spirit R combined every single limited-run feature from previous limited-run models that Mazda had produced throughout the RX-7’s production years.
In Forza Horizon 5, the Mazda RX-7 Spirit R sits alongside the “regular” RX-7 FD3S. Both cars handle similarly in stock form. However, after a mandatory tune-up and overall upgrade, the RX-7 will start to oversteer like there’s no tomorrow.
The un-tuned “race” suspension in the Mazda RX-7 Spirit R will not be able to harness the additional power from the engine upgrades you had applied to the RX-7. Without further tuning and setup, the additional power will make it very difficult to control the RX-7’s oversteer.
However, after hours of gameplay and fine-tuning, we have come up with a good base suspension tune that will harness the 700-ish horsepower of the fully upgraded Mazda RX-7 Spirit R.
Mazda RX-7 Spirit R Community Tune
There are two ways to grab and copy tunes from the Forza Horizon 5 community. These are:
- Community Tunes
- Manually Input Tune Values
Community Tunes are community-shared tuning setups that are available for download in-game. To access these setups:
- Go to the Festival Main Menu by pressing ESC:
2. Click on “Cars”:
3. Click on Buy New & Used Cars:
Click “Yes” when prompted to Fast Travel:
4. In the Festival Menu, click on “Garage”:
5. Click on “Upgrades & Tuning”:
6. Under the Upgrades & Tuning menu, click on “Find Tuning Setups”:
7. All of the shared community tunes for your current car will show up here:
Simply click any of the tunes you like from the list. Click on the tune you want to Download and Install it.
The chosen tune will automatically be applied to your car, along with the necessary upgrades that the chosen tune employs. You might have to spend some additional credits to apply some of these tunes.
Mazda RX-7 Spirit R Top 2% Manual Tune
This special tune is the product of hours and hours of trial and error. This tune aims to suppress the overpowering oversteer problem of the Mazda RX-7 and improve overall performance for competitive time-attack in Forza Horizon 5.
This tune also takes the already stellar road holding and turn-in capability of the lightweight RX-7 chassis and dials it up to 11. With this tune, most sweeping turns can be cleared without taking your foot (or fingers) off of the gas pedal.
Here’s the full tune setup:
Tires:
Gearing:
Alignment:
Antiroll Bars:
Springs:
Damping:
Aero:
Brake:
Differential:
Note: Every single tuning upgrade must be purchased to unlock the full potential of this tune.
We placed within the Top 2% of the S1 Rivals Leaderboard at the Bahia de Plano Circuit by using this tune. We chose this track because of its mix of hard-braking and slow-speed turns. Several long sweeping turns highlight the high-speed cornering potential of this tune as well.
It is worth noting, though, that we can definitely place higher with even more time behind the wheel of the RX-7.
The only real “problem” of this tune is its tendency to oversteer out of slow corners. The massive power of the fully-tuned Rotary engine is to blame.
Unfortunately, we are not entirely sure how we can fix this problem without nerfing the rest of the great handling capabilities of the car on other sections of the track. This is not a huge problem, though, since exit oversteer can easily be fixed with careful throttle control.
Probably any car with almost 700-horsepower at the rear wheels will definitely spin its tires to infinity and beyond. Right?
Unlimited Potential
Thirty years later, the Mazda RX-7 still proves just how capable it is as a serious tuning platform. If it weren’t for the high-maintenance nature of the Wankel Rotary Engine, the RX-7 would’ve definitely been the go-to tuning and track platform for many teams and tuning houses.
However, for the tuning teams that can afford to keep up with the maintenance costs that come with running the RX-7 competitively, the car can become a track monster with the right setup and mods. Just ask the Touge Monster tuners at RE Amemiya.
The same can be said for a game like Forza Horizon 5. The RX-7 has sky-high tuning potential that can help it compete with modern, high-powered supercars in-game such as the Porsche 911 GT2, Lamborghini Huracan, and Ferarri 488 to name a few. We can only imagine the disbelief on their faces when they’re beaten by this ancient RX-7.
With that said, we hope that you find this RX-7 tune useful. If you’re a fan of the Dorito-powered 90s sports car from Japan, then you will definitely love this tune.
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