Pacific Shipyard Strategy

By J.N. Cobb

Forza Motorsport™ has hundreds of cars and tracks to test your automotive know-how as well as your driving skills. Each car can be customized with thousands of after-market parts and fine-tuned to maximize its on-road potential.

When racing on the Pacific Shipyards, you'll want to be behind the wheel of a machine that can handle everything, from brisk straight-aways to hairpin loops to roadways paved with brick.

Welcome to the waterfront.

The Pacific Shipyard is a point-to-point track that covers four miles of waterfront roadway. You can go from point A to point B or B to A, but either way, you'll navigate a series of both gentle and sharp turns, past heavy cranes and cargo containers, as you blaze through deserted city streets in the wee hours of the morning.

There are no extended stretches of straight-aways, but there are at least three long segments of the track where you can really test what's under your hood. In short, Pacific Shipyard has something for everyone and will test all of the skills you need to develop.

Fine-tuning your vehicle for the Shipyard requires some experience with both the track and your car, but there are a few basic tweaks you can make to give you an edge. Set your Alignment slightly toward toe-out to bump up your turn-in ability. (There are enough twists and turns on this track to more than make up for the loss in stability.) Likewise, give Alignment a little extra negative camber to help grip the road around the sharper turns in the loop and in the final button-hook stretch on the south end of the track.

Things are about to get rougher.

Most of the Shipyards run takes place on smooth, solid asphalt, but there is a rough patch of brick paving right where it'll slow you down the most: in the 360-degree loop roughly one-third of the way from the northern end of the run. It's worth softening up your front springs just a tad to give yourself extra control over this bumpy patch. The slight loss in responsiveness and the extra under-steering are worth it for the improved handling and better speed consistency.

By the same token, you want to set both bump and rebound Damping to medium-low, smoothing out the bumps and improving your transitional under-steering. You'll come out of the bricks quicker and recover more smoothly than if you left the front springs stiff.

Finally, set your Brake Balancing to the rear to give you a little more leeway around the turns that you'll be taking. The curves aren't generally severe, but there are a lot of them, and you'll often be jockeying for position against the other drivers as you navigate through the trickiest ones.

It's important to give yourself as many options for breaking away from the pack as possible, even if it means using the brake or E-brake to skid into the key position. You'll lose less momentum and recover more quickly if you've tuned your car for the right blend of rotation and stability.

Skill and experience give you pole position.

Forza Motorsport is not a game that encourages high-risk moves, like drifting around turns—mostly because of the potential damage if you skid to far, but also because it costs you speed and maneuverability. However, this doesn't mean you can't exploit the E-brake to your advantage, especially on the sharpest turns near the loop and the southern button-hook.

Each of these tight turns comes after a solid stretch of straight road, so you will usually have built up a decent amount of momentum going into them. A light touch on the E-brake can get through the turn and position you for maximum acceleration when the track straightens out again.

Pacific Shipyard favors lighter cars with good acceleration because they are easier to control and maximize your speed along the way. Though it's one of the first tracks that you'll encounter in the Driving Career mode, it's also one of the most diverse. You will experience all kinds of turns, multiple road surfaces, and even a few all-out straights for sprinting, all packed tightly together.

If you can handle the challenges of Pacific Shipyard, you know you're ready for the tougher events, courses, and online play still to come.