fSteeringLock
Steering lock
fSteeringLock is the maximum angle the front wheels can turn, in degrees. Matched to the tyre it gives a car that turns in cleanly; set past what the tyre can use, the car understeers earlier.
- Unit
- degrees
- stored in radians plus 1 ÷ rad
- Vanilla median
- 40
- Drift Yosemite 80.5, tanks 20
- Good match
- lateral × 1.25 + 10
- 38.1° for the vanilla 22.5°
- Applies
- live
- SetVehicleHandlingFloat
Try it on a real car
The white wheels turn to your value, the dashed pair shows the angle that fits this car's tyre. The number in between is the gap.
Maximum steering angle. A good match is fTractionCurveLateral times 1.25 plus 10; drift cars run 60 and up.
Open this in the editorFront wheels at full lock
Drift setups run 60° to 80° on purpose. A grip car at those angles just understeers sooner.
Lock and slip angle are two different things
Steering lock is how far the wheel turns. The slip angle is where the tyre grips most, and that comes from fTractionCurveLateral: the peak sits at half its value, 11.25° on most vanilla cars.
Turn the wheel past the point where the tyre has already peaked and the extra angle only adds slip. The car turns in fast and then pushes wide. That is why the community rule multiplies the lateral value by 1.25 and adds 10: enough lock to reach the peak with margin for counter-steer, no more.
- Recommended
- fTractionCurveLateral × 1.25 + 10
- Vanilla 22.5°
- 38.1°, which is why so many cars sit at 35 to 42
- Peak slip
- fTractionCurveLateral ÷ 2
Why drift cars break the rule
Drift handling wants the front wheels to follow a slide, which means a counter-steer angle far beyond the grip peak. Rockstar's drift variants run 60° to 80.5°, paired with a wide lateral range and a low sliding grip. On a grip car the same number just makes the front wash out.
Low speed is the other case. Lock decides the turning circle in a car park, so buses and trucks run lower values on purpose and small city cars run higher ones.
Values in the game
Only 84 distinct values across 608 cars, and most of them are 35, 40 or 42.
Computed from the 608 vanilla cars that have a public measurement, one entry per handling name. Motorcycles (49) are kept out of the chart; they run 22 to 45.
Bars cover the 1st to 99th percentile. Extremes: 20 (Invade and Persuade Tank) to 80.5 (Drift Yosemite (Drift)).
- Industrial · 1122 35 45
- Utility · 2124.5 35 68
- Vans · 2230 35 40
- Off-Road · 5726 36 77
- Compacts · 1429 36 48
- Service · 1035 36 40
- SUVs · 4535 37 43.5
- Military · 1220 39 42
- Sports · 11725.75 40 80
- Sports Classics · 4928 40 76
- Super · 6030 40 42.75
- Muscle · 8132 40 80.5
- Sedans · 4434 40 79.75
- Commercial · 1535 40 42
- Coupes · 1935 40 75
- Emergency · 3135 40 44
Five cars from the bottom to the top
- Lowest20Invade and Persuade TankMilitary
- 25th percentile36Caracara 4x4Off-Road
- Median40RuinerMuscle
- 75th percentile40TyrusSuper
- Highest80.5Drift Yosemite (Drift)Muscle
Applying it
SetVehicleHandlingFloat(veh, 'CHandlingData', 'fSteeringLock', 38.0)
Changes apply at once. If the wheels visually clip the arches at full lock, that is the model, not the handling; lower the value or accept it.
Related fields
- fTractionCurveLateral
Slip angle range. Peak grip sits at half this value; wider is more forgiving, narrower is snappier.
In the index - fTractionCurveMax
Peak cornering grip before the tyres let go. Vanilla cars sit between 1.6 and 2.65, which is arcade grip on purpose.
Read the page - fTractionBiasFront
Share of grip on the front tyres. Above 0.5 the front sticks more; 0 or 1 makes wheels vanish.
In the index - fBrakeForce
Brake strength per wheel. Above a quarter of fTractionCurveMax the tyres are the limit, not the brakes.
Read the page
Numbers on this page come from the vanilla handling files of GTA V (one entry per handling name, 55 fields catalogued) and from a speed model checked against 617 measured top speeds. Published 2026-09-08. Not affiliated with Rockstar Games or Cfx.re.