Originally Posted by
Retro Grouch
Isn't that what I said? I think that's the point cyccommute was trying to say too. There's more to speed it than just final gear ratio.
You can say that "there's more to the maximum speed that you can achieve than just final gear ratio" -- that would be correct. But it's also really obvious that TDF riders go faster than all of us and it's not because of gear ratios they have on their bikes that none of us have thought to install.
Nobody's talking about that though, the discussion was specifically about gear calculators which do one simple thing -- show you the speed you would go for a given cadence and gear combination for a given bike/wheel size.