Originally Posted by
JohnM16
With those cassettes, no matter what chainrings you use, the range (lowest to highest gear) is smaller.
The range of a hypothetical 10-32 is simply larger than an 11-34. That's it.
Cheers
JM
Yes - but do you *actually need it*?
I gave you the gear tables on the Campagnolo CRM.
You are looking at a difference between 497 & 480% between 10-32 (I didn't do the 10-34 calculation) and 11-32, assuming 45/29 chainrings.
45 x 10 is a top gear of approx 121" depending on tyre profile.
To put that in context, Merxkx used 52 x 14, or 100.2" (calculated on the same basis) to break the world hour record.
If the criterion is to gain as low a bottom gear as you can, 11-34 is the way to go, it works perfectly and your warranty is maintained.
Lets put it this way - in the WT, no one is regularly using top gears of over 120" unless they're descending at 90kph plus or pushing 1kw plus in a sprint.
Also as I pointed out in the Campagnolo CRM - no manufacturer can or will ever make to suit every possible use-case - it has to be economic.
Once you understand the economics of manufacture and stack up how many you need to make and sell, at the moment (things do change, it's only a few short years ago that manufacturers thought 34 x 29 was a low enough gear on the road), 10-32 is a non-starter for Campagnolo, just as the combination I wanted, 11-25 was, in 12s (where I live, I barely ever even use 39 x 25). I ran the numbers in R & D / testing / production costs so I can be pretty sure of that.