S2 Class Guide: Best S2 Cars &, Tuning Forza Horizon 6

What Makes S2 Class Different

S2 isn't just "S1 but faster." Nope. That's the first mistake everyone makes, and it's the reason you see half the lobby flying into walls on turn one while the other half is desperately trying to remember which button is rewind because they haven't touched that button since they graduated from C class three months ago and thought they were hot stuff. The PI range from 901 to 998 means these cars are generating enormous amounts of downforce while simultaneously trying to break traction at every possible moment, and you're dealing with physics that Forza's engine handles differently than the lower classes, and you can feel it in the steering. Yeah. Trust me.

In A class and S1, you can get away with being a bit sloppy. Miss your braking point by twenty feet? Whatever, lift off, turn in, you're fine. Every time. Big deal. Yep. At S2 speeds, twenty feet late on the brakes means you're in the barrier, or worse, you're in the river at the bottom of the canyon wondering how you went from first place to swimming in the space of two seconds, and the margin for error shrinks dramatically, and you're discovering this truth at 260 mph while three other cars are using your rear bumper as their personal braking assist and you can hear your own heartbeat in your headphones. Yep.

Think about it.

What really separates S2 from everything below it is the sheer amount of information you need to process. Speed, braking distance, corner entry angle, throttle modulation, and whether the guy behind you is about to divebomb, all at 250 mph. It's overwhelming at first. Completely overwhelming.

Obviously.

I remember my first week in S2 lobbies. Loaded up a maxed out Lambo, felt invincible for about twelve seconds, then spent the rest of the race facing the wrong direction. Humiliating. Yeah. But that's the thing about this class, you can't buy your way to the top. Yep, and the car matters, sure, but understanding how S2 physics work matters way more. Way more. For real. I learned that the hard way after burning through about two million credits on cars that I thought would carry me and instead they just carried me straight into every guardrail on the map.

The track selection changes too when you hit S2. Those tight technical circuits that were fun in B class? Nightmares. They become absolute nightmares. For real, and s2 favors long sweeping corners, highway sections where you can stretch the gearing, and circuits with enough runoff that a small mistake doesn't end your race. The game knows this, and the S2 playlist reflects it perfectly, which is why you'll notice certain circuits showing up way more often in rotation than they ever did in lower class lobbies.

How S2 Differs From S1 and Other Classes

Let me put this in perspective. A good S1 car hits maybe 210 mph on the highway and pulls about 1.8g in the corners, and that feels fast until you step into an S2 car and realize everything you thought you knew about speed was basically a lie, and a properly tuned S2 car will blow past 270 mph and sustain over 2.5g through sweeping turns, which means you're carrying fifty more miles per hour through the same corner that used to feel fast at 180. Fifty. Not kidding. That's the difference between hitting the apex and hitting the photographer standing behind the barrier.

Think about that for a second. Fifty more miles per hour. Through the same corner. Yep. Insane.

Here is the thing.

Race length matters differently in S2 too. Shorter races favor acceleration builds, longer ones reward top speed and tire management, and there's this weird middle ground where track position matters more than either and you find yourself doing mental math about how many laps your tires will last, and in S1 you can kinda build one car and use it for everything. In S2, that one-size-fits-all approach will get you smoked by anyone who bothered to read the track description. Yep. Every. Single. Time.

Honestly, the biggest shock coming from S1 is how much more important aerodynamics become. In lower classes, aero is nice to have. Toss a Forza wing on there, set it to cornering, done. Always. Easy. But in S2, your downforce balance between front and rear defines your entire driving experience and you'll spend hours tweaking it by tiny increments because half a click too much front downforce and the rear steps out under braking while half a click too much rear and you understeer straight into the desert at speeds that would get you arrested on any public road. It's that precise. One wrong click and your whole build falls apart.

Best S2 Cars Ranked

Look, tier lists in S2 are more subjective than people admit, and I've seen forum arguments about which car is best that went on for thirty pages with spreadsheets and telemetry data and someone eventually got banned and honestly it was kind of impressive how seriously people take this stuff. A car that dominates on the Goliath might be useless on a tight street circuit. But after a few hundred hours of testing, racing online, and comparing lap times across the Mexico map, here's where I land on the top S2 cars in FH6 right now.

The Koenigsegg Jesko Attack sits at number one, and tbh it's not even that close. With the right tune this thing hits 290 mph on the highway and somehow still grips like it's on rails through the canyon sections. The active rear steering gives it this weird ability to rotate mid-corner that no other car can match. Always. Its weakness is low-speed acceleration, the gearing is so tall for top end that you lose a beat coming out of hairpins, and still the king though. Still the undisputed king.

Second spot goes to the Porsche 918 Spyder, which surprised me because I've always been more of a Ferrari guy growing up with posters of Testarossas on my wall and a deep distrust of anything German with more than four cylinders. The hybrid instant torque fills in every gap in the power band, and the all-wheel-drive system puts power down so cleanly you can basically floor it at apex and trust the car to sort itself out, and it tops out around 275 mph which is fine for most tracks, and the handling is so forgiving that it's probably the best S2 car for someone just getting into the class. Yep. Beginner friendly. Yep. Seriously forgiving.

The McLaren Senna takes third and honestly, on handling circuits it might be number one. Its downforce numbers are absolutely ridiculous, something like 800 kg at 155 mph, wich means corners that other cars take at 180 you're taking at 210. Wild. For real. The tradeoff is straight-line speed. It struggles past 260 mph and on the long highway runs you'll watch Jeskos and Bugattis walk away from you. But on tracks like the Copper Canyon sprint? Untouchable. Absolutely untouchable.

At number four I'm putting the Ferrari FXX-K Evo. This is a track-only car that Ferrari never intended for roads, and in FH6 it feels exactly like that. Raw. Yeah. Unfiltered. Always. The V12 hybrid setup screams to 9500 rpm and the active aero adjusts in real time. It's a handful though, the rear end wants to step out if you're too aggressive with the throttle, and it definately rewards smooth inputs over brute force. Seriously, and you can't manhandle this car. You have to ask nicely.

The Rimac Nevera at fifth is the wildcard. All-electric, 1,914 horsepower, instant torque at any RPM. On paper it should dominate everything and win every race by ten seconds and make every other car look like it's standing still. In practice, it weighs as much as a small house and you feel every pound in the corners, every single one of them reminding you that physics doesn't care about your horsepower number. Yep. But on tracks with long straights and gentle curves, the Nevera is basically cheating, and zero to 250 in what feels like four seconds. No joke. Four.

Rounding out the top ten, the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300+ is the king of top speed but handles like a cruise ship in tight sections and you'll spend half the race fighting understeer and the other half wondering why you didn't just pick the Jesko. The Lamborghini Sian FKP 37 blends hybrid torque with Lambo drama and works everywhere without being the best anywhere. The Aston Martin Valkyrie is basically an F1 car with license plates, insane grip but so twitchy that one wrong input sends you spinning, and the Pagani Huayra R brings active aero that you can actually feel working in real time, plus one of the best engine sounds in the game. Always. And the Hennessey Venom F5 rounds things out as the American wildcard, all horsepower and attitude with a learning curve steeper than the volcano climb. Pure chaos. Beautiful chaos.

I've also got to mention the Koenigsegg CCGT as an honorable pick. It's technically lower PI stock but with the right engine swap and tuning it becomes an absolute monster on handling tracks, the kind of car that makes you feel like you discovered a secret that nobody else knows about and you almost don't want to share it because it's your little advantage. Some of my fastest Copper Canyon times came from this car, not the Jesko. Promise. True story.

S2 Tuning Basics

Tuning in S2 isn't optional. You can get away with stock tunes in lower classes, maybe tweak the final drive and call it a day. But in S2, a good tune versus a stock setup can be the difference between podium and dead last. Without fail. Three, four seconds a lap easy. Without fail, and and when races are decided by tenths, that's an eternity. A whole eternity.

Downforce balance is where you start. Always. No exceptions. I run between 60 and 70 percent rear bias on most S2 builds because having the rear planted under power matters more than razor-sharp turn-in. The front aero takes care of itself at S2 speeds, there's so much air moving over the car that you'll rarely struggle with front-end grip. What you will struggle with is the rear trying to overtake the front when you breathe on the throttle. Seriously. More rear downforce fixes that. Simple.

Gearing is the next big one, and ngl this is where I see most people get it wrong, they set their final drive way too short and then wonder why they're bouncing off the limiter at 240 mph with half the straight still ahead of them and three cars blowing past like they're standing still. The default final drive on most S2 cars is just criminally short for what these cars can actually do. You'll hit the limiter at 240 mph with half the straight still ahead of you. Promise, and i set my final drive so the car tops out around 280 to 285 mph on the longest straight of whatever track I'm building for. Not kidding. For the Goliath that means taller gearing, for street circuits you can go shorter and grab the acceleration benefit. Simple tradeoff. Massive difference.

Here is the thing.

First and second gear deserve special attention. At S2 power levels, first gear is basically useless for anything except launching from a standstill, and even then you're probably spinning more than you're accelerating. I lengthen first gear significantly on most builds, enough that I'm not just spinning tires for the first two seconds of every race. Promise, and second gear becomes your de facto corner exit gear for tight turns, so get that spacing right between second and third. Getting it wrong means bogging down on exit. Getting it right means rocketing out of corners while the other guy is still fighting his gearbox.

Suspension setup at S2 speeds requires a different philosophy than lower classes, a mindset shift where you stop thinking about what feels comfortable in the garage and start thinking about what works when the car is being crushed into the pavement by a thousand pounds of downforce at speeds that would make your grandmother faint. You need stiffer springs and dampers to handle the aero load, which compresses the suspension at high speed. I run spring rates about twenty percent stiffer than what feels comfortable in the parking lot, because at 250 mph with full downforce, those "too stiff" springs are suddenly perfect. Always. Anti-roll bars go stiffer in the rear than the front on AWD cars to help rotation, and on RWD cars I soften the rear bar slightly to keep the inside tire from lighting up. For real, and it's counterintuitive. The whole thing is counterintuitive until you feel it working.

Camber matters more than people think. Between negative 1.5 and negative 2.0 degrees front, negative 1.0 to 1.5 rear. Any more than that and you're sacrificing braking stability, that feeling where you hit the brakes hard and the car starts wandering around like it can't decide which direction it wants to go. Toe I keep at zero or very slight toe-in at the rear for high-speed stability. Yeah. Toe-out at the front makes the car feel darty, wich is the last thing you want at 270 mph. Please. For real. Do not put toe-out on an S2 car.

Diff settings can make or break an S2 build. On AWD cars I run about 65 percent rear bias with acceleration lock around 75 percent and deceleration at maybe 20 percent. This gives you the stability of AWD under power without the understeer that high front lock creates. On RWD builds, acceleration lock at 85 percent with decel at 10 to 15 percent. Seriously, and the car will rotate under braking but won't snap on you, that beautiful feeling of the rear stepping out just enough to help you turn without stepping out so far that you're facing the wrong way and the entire lobby is laughing at you. Finding that balance is the whole game.

S2 Racing Tips

Braking at 250 mph is a completely different skill from braking at 150 mph. The distance you need basically triples, not doubles, because kinetic energy scales with the square of velocity and your brain hasn't evolved to intuitively understand exponential relationships at triple-digit speeds, and i start braking at the 300 meter board for heavy braking zones in S2, versus maybe 150 meters in S1. Go figure. And that's with fully upgraded race brakes and brake pressure set to 95 percent. 300 meters. Think about that.

Game over.

Here's a thing that took me embarrassingly long to figure out. Don't brake in a straight line all the way to turn-in. Trail brake instead. Stay on the brakes about twenty percent into the corner entry while you start turning. Go figure. This keeps weight on the front tires, gives you more rotation, and actually shortens your braking distance because you're using the tires more efficiently. Every fast S2 driver does this, and once you learn it you'll wonder how you ever drove without it. Life changing. No exaggeration.

Think about it.

Throttle control is arguably more important than braking in S2. These cars have so much power that mashing the gas at corner exit just sends torque straight to tire smoke, and you'll be sitting there spinning your tires while your exit speed drops and every car within half a mile closes the gap and passes you. I feed in throttle gradually, maybe thirty percent at apex, fifty percent as the car straightens, full throttle only once the steering wheel is basically centered. Go figure. It feels slow at first but your exit speed will be higher, and exit speed is what carries all the way down the next straight. Go figure. Patience on the gas. It pays.

In my experience, the single biggest speed secret in S2 is understanding weight transfer. When you brake, weight shifts forward and your rear gets light, and when you accelerate, weight shifts back and your front gets light. If you try to turn while the weight is in the wrong place, the car won't respond, it'll just push straight ahead like you're not even turning the wheel and you'll sit there confused about why the physics simulation suddenly stopped working. Learning to time your inputs with where the weight is sitting, that's the difference between a 2:05 and a 2:02 on the Goliath. Three seconds. Yeah. Just from weight transfer.

Corner entry is where races are won or lost at this level. Come in too hot and you understeer wide, losing all your momentum and watching your gap evaporate, and come in too slow and the guy behind you sails past. Go figure. I aim to be at about 80 percent of the car's maximum cornering speed at turn-in, then carry that speed through the apex. If the tires aren't making any noise, you're going too slow. Crank it up. If they're screaming, you've overcooked it. That slight hum right at the edge of grip, that's the sweet spot. Music.

Best S2 Cars for Different Race Types

Road racing circuits like the Copper Canyon and the stadium tracks reward handling above everything. You want the McLaren Senna, the Porsche 918, or the CCGT here. These tracks have enough technical sections that pure speed cars never get to stretch their legs, and by the time they hit the one straight, you've already built a gap through the corners. Without fail. The Senna especially dominates on any track with more than three braking zones per lap. Three zones. That's all it takes for the Senna to pull ahead and never look back.

Street Scene races are a different beast entirely, a completely different world where your perfectly tuned track setup becomes a liability and every curb is a potential catastrophe waiting to launch you into a wall at speeds that would total a real car. The bumpy roads and hard barriers punish cars with stiff suspension and low ground clearance. I've watched so many people bring their perfectly tuned track cars into street races and then bounce off a curb straight into a wall. Without fail. Every time. I laugh every time.

The Porsche 918 shines here because its suspension has enough compliance to handle bumps without losing composure, soaking up the road imperfections like they're not even there while other cars are bouncing around like they're driving on the moon. The Lamborghini Sian also works well, the hybrid system helps pull you out of slow corners that street circuits tend to have. Avoid the Senna on street races, its ride height is too low and you'll bottom out on every drainage grate. Always. Bottoming out means losing control, and losing control means losing the race. Don't bring a Senna to a street fight.

Sprints, especially the long highway runs and the Goliath, are where top speed builds take over. Jesko, Chiron Super Sport, Hennessey Venom F5, these are the cars you want when the track is mostly point-and-shoot and the only thing between you and the finish line is how fast your car can go in a straight line. The Jesko is still my pick because it has enough handling to not fall apart in the few corners these tracks have, while matching the Chiron's top end, and build it with a slight handling bias and you've got the most versatile sprint car in the game. For real. Done.

Dirt and cross-country in S2? Look, I'm gonna be real with you. S2 on dirt is chaos and honestly I love it for exactly that reason, there's something beautiful about taking a million-dollar hypercar and sending it sideways through a mud pit at 200 miles per hour while rocks ping off the underbody. Without fail. But if you want to actually win, the Lamborghini Urus and Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT are your best bets, both can be built to high S2 with rally suspension and off-road tires, and the Rimac Nevera is surprisingly capable on dirt too, that instant torque helps on loose surfaces where traditional engines bog down. Who knew. Without fail. An electric hypercar, doing rally stuff. It works.

S2 vs X Class: Why S2 Is the Competitive Sweet Spot

You might be wondering why not just jump to X class if you want the fastest cars. Fair question. X class removes the PI cap, so you can max out every upgrade and create absolute monsters with 1,800 horsepower and more downforce than a fighter jet. Without fail. Sounds awesome, right? Wrong. Well, partly wrong.

And it is awesome, for about five minutes. Then you realize that X class races are basically a lottery where nobody can actually control their car and every corner is a prayer to the physics gods that you'll come out the other side still pointing forward. The cars are so fast that reaction time barely matters, it's just about who gets the cleanest line through traffic and who doesn't get taken out by someone who forgot to brake. Always, and there's no meta, no tuning depth, no real competition. Just chaos at 300 mph. Pure, unfiltered, meaningless chaos.

S2, by comparison, has a defined ceiling. PI 998 means everyone is working with roughly the same performance budget, and the differences come down to car choice, tuning skill, and driving ability. That's what makes it the actual competitive class for high-level players. Always. The ranked ladder, the tournaments, the content creator rivalries, they all happen in S2 for a reason. Real competition. Actual skill gaps.

So yeah.

I think of X class as a playground and S2 as the actual sport. Go mess around in X class when you want to see what 300 mph looks like from cockpit view and feel your brain struggle to process scenery moving that fast, and but if you want to actually get better at the game, live in S2. The skills transfer downward to every other class, which X class skills absolutely do not. X class teaches you nothing. S2 teaches you everything.

Personally, I spend maybe ninety percent of my FH6 time in S2 now, and I've gotten to the point where racing in lower classes feels like watching a movie in slow motion and I keep accidentally braking way too early because my brain is calibrated for cars that need a football field to stop. A class and S1 are fun, B class is a nice change of pace, but S2 is where the game reveals its full depth, and every tuning decision matters, every line choice matters, every millimeter of braking zone matters. That level of precision is addictive. Hopelessly addictive.

Common S2 Mistakes Beginners Make

The number one mistake I see, and I mean every single lobby without fail, is people building for top speed and nothing else, they see that 290 mph number on the spec sheet and their eyes glaze over and they think they've built the ultimate car without realizing that top speed only helps you on about ten percent of any given track and the other ninety percent is corners where their car handles like a shopping cart with a rocket strapped to it. They see 290 mph on the spec sheet and think they're invincible. Then the first corner comes and they discover that a car with no handling upgrades at 290 mph has the turning circle of an aircraft carrier. Meanwhile the guy in the Senna who built for balance is three corners ahead. Yep. Every. Single. Wild, right? Race.

Yep.

Another classic, upgrading to AWD on every single car. I get the instinct, AWD feels safer and easier and it's the first thing you learn when you start playing Forza because everyone tells you AWD is the meta and you should always convert. But some of the fastest S2 builds in FH6 are RWD. The weight savings alone can be worth thirty or forty PI points, points you can spend on power or handling instead of a drivetrain swap you might not actually need. Wild, right?, and the Ferrari FXX-K Evo and McLaren Senna are both monsters in RWD configuration, and converting them to AWD often makes them slower overall despite feeling more planted. Counterintuitive. Without fail. Absolutely counterintuitive but the lap times don't lie.

Overdriving is the silent killer, the thing that nobody talks about because it doesn't show up on the spec sheet and there's no telemetry graph that tells you you're doing it wrong until you look at your lap times and realize you're a full second slower than you should be. In S2, smooth is genuinely fast. Jerky steering inputs, stabbing the throttle, slamming the brakes, all of that unsettles the car and costs you time. Yeah. I had to completely relearn my driving style when I moved up to S2 because the aggressive habits that worked fine in A class were actively slowing me down here. Go figure. The car is already at the limit, it doesn't need your help getting there. Relax. Let the car work.

Forgetting to adjust tire pressure for race length. This sounds minor but at S2 speeds, tire heat builds up fast, and on longer races, starting with slightly lower pressure, say 28 psi cold, means you'll hit the optimal 32 to 33 psi after a lap or two and stay there. Start at 32 cold and by lap three your tires are at 36, you're sliding, and wondering why the car suddenly feels awful. It's the tires, it's always the tires. Check them. Every race.

Think about it.

How to Earn Your First S2 Car

Getting into S2 doesn't require a billion credits, tbh the game throws money at you once you know where to look and you stop spending all your credits on random cars you'll drive once and then leave in your garage for six months. Wheelspins are the obvious answer, you'll get dozens of them just from leveling up and completing story missions. Super wheelspins especially can drop S2 cars directly, and even if you don't get one, the credit payouts add up fast. Spin them. Always spin them.

Seriously.

The Auction House is where you find the real deals, the hidden gems that people are selling for half price because they don't know what they have or they're just trying to clear out their garage and don't care about the credits. A lot of players sell S2 cars they don't use for well below autoshow price, especially common ones like the Lamborghini Sesto Elemento or the Ferrari LaFerrari. Check the auction house before you buy anything from the autoshow, you'll regularly save a few hundred thousand credits on cars that are functionally identical. Without fail. Free money. Always. Basically free money.

Seasonal events and the Festival Playlist are your most reliable source of high-end S2 cars, and honestly if you're not doing these every week you're leaving free cars on the table that could be sitting in your garage right now. Playground Games is generous with the rewards, at least one new S2 car per season, often two or three. Do the weekly challenges, bang out the PR stunts, and you'll have a garage full of S2 weapons within a month of regular play, and the seasonal reward cars are also usually exclusive, meaning you can't get them any other way. Yep. Don't skip the playlist and stuff like that.

Not even close.

If you're starting from absolute zero, I'd say the Porsche 918 Spyder is the best first S2 purchase. It's not the cheapest option but it's the most forgiving, and you can use it on literally any track type without feeling like you brought the wrong car. Learn S2 in the 918, then branch out to the more specialized cars once you've got a feel for the class, and master the beginner car first. Then go crazy.

One last thing, don't sleep on the autoshow cars just because they're common, because some of the most competitive S2 builds in the entire game start with cars that you can buy for pocket change compared to the hyper-exclusive stuff. The Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, McLaren 720S, and Ferrari 488 Pista can all be built into competitive S2 cars for way less money than the hyper-exclusive stuff. A well-tuned 488 Pista will beat a poorly tuned Jesko seven days a week, and the driver mod is free. Not kidding. The driver mod is always free.

Why?

Final Thoughts on Racing S2 Online

S2 online lobbies have a reputation for being toxic, and look, some of that reputation is earned. High speed plus fragile egos plus anonymous usernames equals chaos sometimes, the kind of chaos where you get punted into a barrier on lap one and spend the rest of the race fighting your way back through the field while muttering things about the other driver's parentage. But it's not as bad as people make it sound, and the races where everything clicks, where you and a stranger battle cleanly for three laps with neither of you touching, those are the best moments Forza has to offer. For real, and pure magic. For real. Worth the bad lobbies.

My advice for jumping into online S2 is simple. Spend ten laps in rivals on whatever track is in rotation before you queue. Know your braking points, know your gearing, know where the bumps are that'll unsettle your car. Yeah. Show up prepared and you'll place top five more often than not, because half the lobby didn't bother. Their loss. Your gain.

And if someone does ram you into a barrier on purpose,which happens, just remember that revenge ramming only takes you both out of the race and turns a bad situation into a worse one where you're both sitting in the dirt watching the rest of the field drive away. The best revenge is catching them cleanly two corners later and never seeing them again. Let your driving do the talking. Let your lap times do the screaming.

Anyway, that's pretty much everything I've learned about S2 after way too many hours in the Mexican sun, chasing lap times and tweaking setups and occasionally rage quitting after getting punted into a river by someone who thought braking was optional. The class has depth that reveals itself slowly, and the feeling of nailing a perfect lap at 270 mph, every apex hit, every exit clean, that feeling never gets old. See you on the Goliath. Yep. I'll be the guy in the Jesko.

Facts.