At this point in the game's lifespan anyone who wants a serious race most likely has a fast tune for every class on every track (and a lot of them will just use 'leaderboard cars') and a lot of practice refining their racing lines to perfection. Unfortunately, that creates a steep learning curve for anyone just getting into the game. If you join the official forzamotorsport.net forums, you can probably find people willing to work with you and watch your replays or follow you around tracks and help you learn the lines. The same people can usually help you find good tunes for your cars, and others can teach you to tune them yourself. But you most likely won't be consistently competitive in online races at this point in the game's lifespan without putting in a lot of practice first.
As for the crashers, when I played all the time (I peaked through FM2 and FM3, and FM4 is a better game but I'm burned out on the series.
![[face_tongue]](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.ignboards.com/styles/ign/ign/smilies/classic/stickouttongue.gif "Stick Out Tongue [face_tongue]")
) I had the most fun when I found a group of guys that I'd race with regularly who I knew wouldn't fuck up a good race on purpose. Again, the IGN Forza board is not really a good place for finding help/people since it's pretty much a ghost town, but the official forums at forzamotorsport.net are a lot better.
I feel like I should mention this though, since I'm kind of pushing the official Forza forums a bit in this post: The forzamotorsport.net forums put all new users on an approval system, where no posts go through without a moderator reviewing and approving them, until a moderator decides to upgrade you to a full member. The best way to get that to happen is to get/make and use a memorable sig pic (it has to fit the forum's rules, though, there's a size limit and of course no nudity/etc) and post a lot (without spamming) over the span of a week or two. The sig pic gives the mods an easy thing to remember you by, (they see too many names to remember names) and posting a lot helps in getting one of the mods to have approved enough of your posts to remember you (there's a few mods and they don't communicate on whose posts they've reviewed). One of them has to remember you making a lot of legitimate posts before they'll upgrade you.
