You know you can just get any decent racing simulator game and test your theories? Wherein ‘Forza Horizon’ and ‘NFS’ aren’t decent sims.

You aren’t getting significant advantage from drafting unless you’re at a high speed, i.e. at those same long straights for which gearing is tuned. If the car isn’t close to redlining the last gear when it reaches the speed where drafting allows for overtaking, that means it lost speed that it could’ve been gaining during the acceleration by having closer gearing.

Maybe your hypothesis works in bus racing, I’m not familiar with that.