With over 400 cars to unlock, Gran Turismo 7 has no shortage of variety. Those cars include every famous make and model you can think of, like Ford, Ferrari, Mustang, Toyota, and McLaren. Harness your inner Austin powers in a Jaguar, your inner Elon Musk in a Tesla, or your inner 007 in an Aston Martin. However, all of those cars span a gamut of Performance Points – or PP, as the game calls it. In short, the lower your car’s PP, the slower and clunkier it is. The higher your PP, the faster and more maneuverable you become.
Of course, some cars can only be tuned so high, whereas others bottom out in the low 600s. We wish we could make a Fiat 500 as fast as an F1 McLaren, but that remains a distant dream. Raising and lowering PP is the key to competing in and winning more races. So how do you raise and lower PP in Gran Turismo 7, and can you do it on the fly?
How to raise PP in Gran Turismo 7
If you want to go faster, make tighter turns, and win more races in Gran Turismo 7, you’ll need to raise your car’s PP. For this example, we’re taking a Dodge Challenger we recently unlocked after completing menu book 25 and winning the European Championship. At 463 PP, the Challenger is decent but not good enough to compete in higher-level races. Of course, we have plenty of souped-up cars at our disposal, but who doesn’t love classic American muscle? Here’s how to raise your PP in Gran Turismo 7.
Step 1: Head to the tuning shop at the bottom of your overworld map. From here, you’ll have five different part tiers to choose from: Sport, Club Sports, Semi-Racing, Racing, and Extreme. Unlock more tuning tiers by increasing your driver level in Gran Turismo 7.
Step 2: Purchase weight reduction upgrades to significantly raise your PP. However, you have to buy the reductions sequentially from stage one to four. There is no stage five. Instead, under the Extreme tab, you can buy a new body to restore your weight modifications to the factory default. The new body costs hundreds of thousands of credits, so don’t go crazy with weight reductions off the bat.
Step 3: Buy new tires to increase your PP exponentially. Sports, Racing, and Extreme come with different tires, with soft racing tires being the best. Adding those to our Challenger increased our PP from 463 to 558. They do, however, cost 38,000 credits.
Step 4: Buy anything that increases your horsepower. Upgrades like Engine Balance Tuning under the Racing tab or the High Lift Cam Shaft under the Club Sports tab will do the trick. The Low-End Torque Supercharger upped our Challenger’s HP from 425 to 575 in one upgrade!
Step 5: Talk to Rupert when you aren’t sure what an upgrade does. Click on any part, and then press Learn More. Rupert will pop up explaining what each part does and if you should combine them with other components. For example, when we bought the Supercharger, he told us to pair it with a Racing Intercooler for the best results. We did, and upped our HP to 593.
Step 6: Step 6: Explore other parts to see how they might change your car’s performance. As a general rule of thumb, anything that doesn’t drastically alter your PP in the tuning shop can be equipped or unequipped via the car settings menu pre-race. We suggest buying a Fully Customizable Suspension that lets you raise and lower your car height and fine-tune other suspension adjustments. Lower cars take tiger turns.
How to lower PP in Gran Turismo 7
After fine-tuning our Challenger, we took it from 463 PP and 425 hp to 633 PP and 734 hp. Unfortunately, we might have overdone it, and now our Challenger is too heavily upgraded to compete in some races. So how do you lower your PP in Gran Turismo 7?
Step 1: The best on-the-fly way to lower PP in Gran Turismo 7 is to change your tires. With our soft racing tires equipped, our Challenger sits at 633 PP. However, swapping to the intermediate racing tires brings us down to 584 PP. Furthermore, switching to soft comfort tires takes us down to 524.
Step 2: When your car is slightly over the limit, fine-tuning your ride can shave a few crucial PP points off the top. Let’s say the PP limit for a particular race is 515, but our Challenger is stuck at 524. (Most races are whole numbers like 500 or 650.)
By raising the car height and removing a few miscellaneous upgrades like the Full Control Computer and our Supercharger, we can get the Challenger down to 510 PP and compete in the race. Keep fine-tuning until you’re just on the cusp. Remember to always make tuning adjustments in a different settings sheet to avoid losing your default or favorite settings.
Step 3: If all else fails, you can head back to the Tuning Shop and purchase a new body and engine. Both upgrades reset your PP to its default settings before you ever bought any upgrades. Unfortunately, this costs hundreds of thousands of credits. So you’re better off buying a new car (one that meets the other qualifications) and upgrading that one to meet PP standards.
Don’t go crazy with upgrades
Many races in Gran Turismo 7 don’t have PP limits. You’re free to use whatever car you want if it meets other requirements like make and model, drivetrain, and tire type. You might have the most souped-up Ferrari in Europe, but it’s useless in Japan. Therefore, don’t waste tens of thousands of credits upgrading one car. Instead, tune multiple cars from different manufacturers, ensuring you’ve got something to drive in every race.
