I don't disagree with you, but I didn't mean what you thought I meant. I simply meant that peak transient acceleration occurs at peak torque in the lowest gear a vehicle has, and acceleration tapers off past peak torque.
Yes, you keep it there because that gives you the best torque multiplication... except in the case of some diesels where torque tapers off greatly as they approach redline.
I have done the math. I even built a wheel torque calculator from scratch for use with video game programming. I had to brush up on my math to update it to take into account wheel sizes, since I can't tell a radian from a median. I had to do that because wheel size actually makes a sizeable difference in the results I'm publishing for an upcoming article given the low power output of the engines I was graphing.
Still working on graphing wheel torque against drivetrain drag, aero drag and rolling resistance, but the fudge factors are so big that classical equations given by the textbooks are almost useless without adding in a whole lot of correction factors...
