Why there is no number on this page
Every guide for this game publishes a linearity value and a deadzone value. Read four of them and you get four different numbers, none stating what hardware they were measured on, which car, or what the reader is supposed to notice afterwards.
A deadzone has one honest purpose: to ignore a control that reports movement while nobody is touching it. That is a property of your hardware, not of the game, and the right value is a little above what your own stick reports at rest. Anything higher spends precision in the middle of the range, which is where almost all of the driving happens.
Linearity is not a fix for anything. It is a choice about where the stick’s travel is spent, and the curve above is the honest way to explain it.
The layouts are the story
The controls menu offers numbered input mappings. Several of them move accelerate and brake off the triggers — onto face buttons, onto the right stick, or in one case onto the same stick that already steers. That last one means the entire driving loop can sit under one thumb.
Almost nobody knows this, because every published control table for this game prints one controller column and does not say which layout it belongs to.
Measure first
Two numbers settle most of this, and both are in the Input Lab. It reports resting drift in the same units the game’s deadzone settings use, and reports how much of the stick’s travel you actually reach. Both are two-minute answers to questions this page would otherwise have to guess at.
