The gleaming new jerseys remained under rain capes for most of the stage and for Team Ineos it was a sodden, bone-chilling and ultimately fruitless 182km through east Yorkshire, with the peloton overhauling all but a single survivor of the day’s breakaway in the final 100 metres, where a spectacular – if unexpected – victory went to the seasoned Dutchman Jesper Asselman of the second-division Roompot-Charles team. Burgundy is the new colour for Sir Dave Brailsford’s team, but this was not vintage stuff.

There was a flag brandished in the thick of the action, but it was not a banner protesting against fracking. Asselman crossed the line with a Yorkshire pennant in his handlebars, which sounds like a propaganda coup for the organisers, but in fact could have been disastrous, as it was being held over the barriers, and when he made his final move inches from the roadside in the final 50 metres, it had snagged in his brake lever. Fortunately, he held on to it rather than letting it fall into his front wheel.

Brailsford was dismissive of the anti-frackers, claiming: “The 15,000 mob that was to attack me this morning didn’t really materialise,” but on the road, the tactical issue for his team was summed up when Chris Froome appeared briefly at the front of the string in the final few kilometres. Froome rarely does domestique work but his teammates had spent most of the stage on the front of the peloton keeping the day’s escapees within reach to enable their young sprinter Chris Lawless to have a crack at the finish, and the wet and the distance had finally got to them.

Under normal circumstances, the four escapees would all have been retrieved, but the Tour de Yorkshire is subtly different, as was seen last year when in an almost identical scenario Harry Tanfield triumphed in Doncaster. There are only four WorldTour teams in this year’s race and not all are here at full strength, which makes for a less controlled race.

Jesper Asselman of Roompot-Charles celebrates winning stage one of the Tour de Yorkshire, from Doncaster to Selby. Photograph: Craig Zadoroznyj/ProSports/Rex/Shutterstock

It was an inhospitable day, with numbing chill and soaking conditions, with showers that varied from annoying to torrential; that made the going more treacherous in a chasing peloton than in a small group. But the final straw for Froome and his teammates was tactical: as Team Sky they were known for using the bludgeon rather than the rapier and the other WorldTour teams – Dimension Data, CCC and Katusha – were happy to let them get on with it.

Mark Cavendish’s Dimension Data did put one rider up on the front but sat back at the critical final moment. The Manxman spent most of the day tucked in about 10th place and ended the stage in eighth, one place ahead of Lawless. Cavendish is short of racing and has been in search of form after losing a large part of last year due to the Epstein-Barr virus, but like Lawless he ran out of teammates to help him at the finish.

Asselman was one of four survivors of a half-dozen, a classic blend from smaller teams: two riders from the Great Britain amateurs, Joe Nally and Sean Flynn, Canyon-DHB’s Jacob Hennessy, the time trial and pursuit specialist Dan Bigham of Ribble Cycles, plus Asselman and the winner of Sunday’s under-23 Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Kevin Vermaerke, who is all of 18 and a half years old.

Hennessy and Flynn went backwards on the only ranked climb of the day, through the Wolds, and it was Bigham who did much of the pacemaking in the final miles. The quartet held a slender lead on the final run up Gowthorpe to the finish line in front of Selby Abbey, where Asselman made a daring move through a tiny gap on the right as the road curved, catching the flag as he did so, gaining a vital few metres as the peloton closed.

On Friday, stage two heads north from Barnsley to Bedale. To help the riders rehearse their tactics for the world championships this September, an intermediate sprint has been added on Harrogate’s Parliament Street, where the worlds will conclude; with a largely flat run-in from there past Ripon Cathedral to Bedale, a second blanket finish is in prospect.