• British team have Thomas and Bernal in second and third • Groupama–FDJ principal says Thibaut Pinot can recover

Dave Brailsford’s rest-day habit of provoking the French resurfaced again as the Tour de France took a 24-hour pause in Albi, a day after the home hero Thibaut Pinot had been unceremoniously worked over by Geraint Thomas and his Ineos teammates in gusting crosswinds.

While Pinot raged against his bad luck at his own team’s media conference, after an opening phase of the Tour in which he had hardly put a foot wrong, Brailsford appeared to relish the Frenchman’s predicament when he spoke to the media. “We are here to race,” the Ineos team principal said. “I live and breathe and think all day about sticking the knife in and, when you get the chance, twisting it.”

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Brailsford’s blunt comments may yet come back to haunt him, despite a first part of the Tour that has lacked the bitterness of a year ago when French fans turned angrily on Chris Froome and what was then Team Sky throughout the Tour, after the four-time winner’s salbutamol investigation was dropped.

Last July, Brailsford was dragged into a slanging match with the UCI president, David Lappartient, after the then Sky team principal had compared the head of world cycling’s governing body to a local French mayor and suggested that spitting by roadside fans was “a French cultural thing”. Brailsford later apologised.

This year’s Tour has seen little anger directed at Ineos, perhaps because of Froome’s absence and also Thomas’s easygoing demeanour.

“It’s a very dramatic change since last year,” Brailsford said. “I guess we can all speculate as to why that may be. It has been interesting to change teams because it makes you think about what you stand for. Ineos is a very different culture to Sky and we are embracing that. It feels a little bit more relaxed and a bit more open.”

But a frustrated Pinot has promised that he has not thrown in the towel, despite slipping to 11th place overall, a minute and a half behind Thomas, going into Wednesday’s stage to Toulouse. “We are still in the game,” his Groupama–FDJ team manager, Marc Madiot, proclaimed as he insisted that Pinot could make up the lost time.

Fighting talk that may be, yet the reality is that Pinot’s team let him down while Thomas and Egan Bernal were backed by a team of all-rounders better equipped to seize the day than any other team in the race.

Pinot’s team of specialists, strong riders but assembled more with the heart than the head, were all at sea when Julian Alaphilippe, Thomas and Bernal moved ahead.

“As the teams have reduced [from nine riders to eight] there’s no slack,” Brailsford said. “You need the guys who can do a bit of everything. As a team we come here with a single focus to try and win the race, we don’t try to win stages. But there are other teams who spread the resources differently.”

Even so, rarely has a Brailsford-led Tour team been in such a good position before the first high mountain stages. With Thomas and Bernal in second and third place respectively, and only Alaphilippe between them and the yellow jersey, it is hard to imagine Team Ineos dropping the ball even with another 11 stages yet to race.

“With myself and Egan second and third it has been a great 10 days,” Thomas said. “Obviously it would be better if we were a couple of seconds behind Alaphilippe rather than a minute but other than that it’s great.”

Meanwhile, if Thomas should unexpectedly falter, Brailsford can look to the 22-year-old Bernal, another of the new generation of riders who can master all disciplines. The Colombian, almost effortlessly it seems, retains second place with the Pyrenees on the horizon.

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“Geraint and Chris are coming to the twilight of their careers, at 33, 34, and I wanted a new Chris Froome,” Brailsford said. “I took two years looking at all the younger riders, junior riders, and then managed to negotiate Egan out of his contract.”

“Geraint has won a Tour so he’s capable of doing it again. The first time should be the hardest. For Egan, all of his credentials suggest he should be able to do it, but until he does we won’t know.”

With only Alaphilippe providing resistance to the Ineos steamroller, the first Pyrenean stage on Thursday and Friday’s time trial in Pau could prove decisive. Both stages offer further opportunities to twist that knife.

“Obviously you’ve got to be more and more aware of Alaphilippe the further the race goes on,” Thomas said. “But there are some big days now in the mountains and the time trial. I guess by the second rest day we’ll know a lot more.”