Richie Porte’s notorious motorhome was still chugging around the roads of Italy this week, even though its occupant had given up and gone home. No one else wanted to take advantage of the suddenly vacant queen-size bed installed in the £130,000 Fleetwood Excursion, along with a shower cubicle and a fitted dinette. So at the end of each stage in the final week of the Giro d’Italia the hulking 36ft-long vehicle has morphed into an auxiliary meeting room for the other members of Team Sky.

As the team’s best-placed rider in the general classification after Porte’s departure, Leopold König was offered the opportunity but turned it down. Perhaps he thought by sleeping in the Tasmanian’s bed he would run the risk of attracting some of the misfortune that had destroyed the erstwhile team leader’s race. Or perhaps he was among those who disapproved of this latest addition to the Team Sky motorcade.

This time, some felt, Dave Brailsford had gone too far in his quest for marginal gains. Five years ago they had laughed when Team Sky’s riders hooked up their bikes to rollers at the end of a stage for a controlled warm-down exercise. They had sneered when the new team turned up for their first race with sleek Jaguar cars for their sporting directors instead of the standard-issue sponsored Skodas. They had sniggered at the news that each rider spent every night sleeping on his own personal mattress, ferried from hotel to hotel. However, they had then been forced to admit, not least by two consecutive Tour de France victories, that Brailsford’s methods worked. And some of those methods, initially derided, had become part of the daily routine of every top team.

But the motorhome was a different matter. Here was an innovation that seemed to threaten something fundamental to the culture of bike racing, and from which, once accepted and widely adopted, there could be no going back.

What it represented was an affront to the social organisation of a three-week grand tour, during which the riders stay overnight in hotels nominated by the race organisers. Often the accommodation is perfectly satisfactory. Sometimes, however, when the race is venturing into remote regions, the choice is necessarily limited and the quarters can be pretty basic, even rudimentary.

Back on Bastille Day in 1993 the 22-year-old Lance Armstrong – who had won his first Tour de France stage in Verdun two days earlier – could be found in a youth hostel in Serre Chevalier, a ski station in the Hautes-Alpes. In the memory of anyone who witnessed the young Texan lying on a narrow dormitory bed that evening, so exhausted from the brutal climbing that he was barely able to speak, the sight may now seem a lot closer to the experience of the pioneers who raced in the earliest Tours than to that of Porte and his gleaming 21st century motorhome, with its antiseptic hand gel dispensers to ward off germs.

It would be hard to overestimate the physical demands on competitors in these races. No other athletes are confronted by the sort of suffering required as one long day in the mountains follows another. Between the stages they need as much proper rest as they can get. Off the bike, they have a mantra: never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down. Body fat reduced to the barest minimum, they live with knowledge their immune systems are often dangerously suppressed, leaving them prone to infections. In that light, you can certainly sympathise when a rider such as Porte jumps at the chance of a consistent resting environment.

However, there are 20 teams in a grand tour, each with nine riders. What if the motorhome fad really caught on, and all 180 competitors demanded one of his own? The traffic jams and the parking problems at the end of each day hardly bear thinking about, not to mention the additional pollution created by an extra 180 diesel or petrol engines grinding up the mountain passes. Or the collateral effect on local hoteliers, for whom the logistics of the race represent a significant bonus.

Less alarming in environmental terms would be the widespread provision of a dedicated vehicle for team leaders only. However, what effect may that have on the traditional team ethos, the democratic spirit in which the No1 rider, perhaps wearing the yellow jersey, sits down to an evening meal alongside the domestiques who have been working for him all day, and sleeps in the same kind of bed? Even football’s superstars are not granted individual treatment. It would be like building a separate changing room for Cristiano Ronaldo at the Bernabéu.

Not everything devised by Team Sky in the search for marginal gains has been a success. When black screens were put up to protect their riders from the public’s gaze during their warm-up and warm-down exercises, Brailsford was very quickly made aware the gesture threatened to damage cycling’s image of accessibility. The screens were never seen again. It was reminiscent of the time, a few years earlier, when Ron Dennis, the McLaren F1 boss, whose obsessive perfectionism could have been the model for Brailsford’s approach, erected similar screens in front of the team’s garage at Silverstone to shield technical secrets from prying eyes and was told by Bernie Ecclestone to take them down because the spectators’ freedom to gawp at cars was one of the sport’s traditions.

Brailsford has only one imperative, which is success. To achieve it, he makes a habit of thinking in a way that used to be termed “lateral” and is now called “outside the box”. Every aspect of the operation has to be examined minutely in order to isolate elements that can be – in Dennis’s favourite word – optimised. Among these are the riders’ minds and bodies, which take terrible punishment amid the grind and turbulence of a grand tour.

The motorhome, however, is a marginal gain too far, and not only because it offends against the sport’s history. When Alberto Contador fell and dislocated his shoulder two weeks ago, he got back on the bike, ignored the pain and set about the job of re-establishing his hold on the pink jersey. Porte’s subsequent disappearance, complaining of knee problems following a crash, seemed to demonstrate a lack of whatever mental toughness it is that separates the great from the merely very good. At which point that beautifully appointed recreational vehicle could be seen for what it was: a gigantic irrelevance.