Forza Horizon 5 Car Mastery explained and how to get Skill Points

Forza Horizon 5 Car Mastery and Skill Points let you enhance your cars with special perks that get you extra rewards and help you rack up ridiculous Skill Chains. This will be a familiar system if you’ve played previous FH games, but if Forza Horizon 5 is your entry point, the short explanation is that it’s a system that lets you unlock rewards by racking up points from your stylish and reckless driving.

As well as offering chunks of cash or XP, these perks also improve your ability to score points with certain Skill Chain tricks, making it even easier to earn Skill Points in the future for even more Car Mastery perks. That’s a very simple rundown of the whole system, so I’ve explained how earning and spending Skill Points for Car Mastery in Forza Horizon 5 works in more detail below.

What is Car Mastery in Forza Horizon 5?

Every car has its own set of Forza Horizon 5 Car Mastery upgrades that apply to only that car, broadly improving its ability to generate points for Skill Chains, provide one-off instant rewards – XP, CR, #Forzathon Points, Wheelspins, and even new cars (more on those below) – and temporary XP boosts for a limited number of races. It’s essentially a points-means-prizes system that gets better the more you perform good Skill Chains, and it works like this:

1. String together tricks while driving to start a Skill Chain.
2. Bank your Skill Chain to score points that contribute towards unlocking Skill Points.
3. Spend your Skill Points on Car Mastery perks for your current car that make higher Skill Chain scores easier to achieve.
4. Repeat to continue earning Skill Points that you can spend on the rest of the Car Mastery perks for your current car, earning lots of rewards.

I highly recommend getting the perks that specifically improve Skill Chain tricks first, and it’s always good to get the Extra Life perk as early as possible as this lets you crash once without losing your Skill Chain (but it is very expensive). Furthermore, while Car Mastery perks are specific to each car, earned Skill Points can be spent on any car, so you could focus on unlocking every perk for your current car or save your Skill Points for a different one.

How to earn Skill Points for Forza Horizon 5 Car Mastery perks

Now that you know the broad strokes of Car Mastery in Forza Horizon 5, you need to know how to earn Skill Points by performing Skill Chains. Any tricks you perform will increase your Skill Chain score and multiplier, but performing a variety of tricks will increase both faster. With that in mind, you’ll want to destroy objects, get air by going over hills and ramps, overtake, perform near-misses, drive at high speed, drift, and more to rack up points. However, crashing your car will end the chain and you’ll lose all your points and won’t gain any Skill Points.

If you don’t perform a trick for a few seconds, you’ll end your Skill Chain and bank your score which will then fill a yellow ring. Completely filling the ring grants you one Skill Point, but it’s possible to fill the ring multiple times with a high enough Skill Chain, getting you multiple Skill Points in one go – getting a score of more than 20,000 points before multipliers results in a Forza Horizon 5 Ultimate Skill Chain, and with a good enough multiplier, this can easily get you a Skill Point or two.

How to spend Skill Points for Forza Horizon 5 Car Mastery perks

Now that you’ve got Skill Points to spend, open the Car Mastery menu by pausing Forza Horizon 5, navigate to the ‘Cars’ tab, and then select the Car Mastery option to bring up a grid of perks specific to your current car. The perks on the grid each have their own Skill Points cost, with the cheapest costing one Skill Point and the most expensive costing up to 50 Skill Points.

Importantly, Car Mastery perks are unlocked like a traditional skill tree in that you can’t unlock some perks unless you have a cheaper one unlocked already. You’ll generally need to buy the perk in the bottom-left corner first and must gradually progress to the top-right corner of the grid.

Forza Horizon 5 Car Mastery cars

As mentioned, some Car Mastery perks in Forza Horizon 5 allow you unlock an exclusive car for your collection, and there are five Car Mastery cars to get. Like Forza Horizon 5 Barn Finds, this is the only way these cars can be unlocked, so if you’re trying to fill out your collection, here are the cars you’re looking for, each costing 50 Skill Points to unlock (on top of any you need to spend to reach this perk):

• 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona Hemi: Spend Skill Points on the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T
• 1991 Hoonigan Porsche 911 Turbo RWB: Spend Skill Points on the 1995 Porsche 911 GT2
• 1992 Hoonigan Mazda RX-7 Twerkstallion: Spend Skill Points on the 1990 Mazda Savanna RX-7
• 1999 Lamborghini Diablo GTR: Spend Skill Points on the 1997 Lamborghini Diablo SV
• 2013 DeBerti Wrangler Unlimited: Spend Skill Points on the 2012 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon

If you want to see the full collection of cars, you can take a look at our Forza Horizon 5 car list.

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