“You need to put some whisky in that,” was the dry comment from one passer-by to the tea seller outside the Yorkshire hotel, just across from Betty’s tearoom, close to the finish line for the world road championships this September. The thermometer was dropping, the rain was falling and the race through the Yorkshire spa town was set to be more testing than expected.

The chance to try out the world road race circuit in competition was a big draw for this year’s Tour de Yorkshire, attracting the reigning men’s and women’s Olympic champions, Greg Van Avermaet and Anna van der Breggen, and the London 2012 women’s champion, Marianne Vos. Eighty-four kilometres from the start in Barnsley, an intermediate sprint in Parliament Street replicated the precise run-in to the finish that will be used in September.

“The worlds will be all about the weather,” commented a staff member in the local shop Chevin Cycles. “They are talking three million spectators coming into town if it’s nice.” That sounds outlandish but, given the vast throngs who turned out for the Grand Départ of the Tour de France in 2014 – and the massed ranks of locals who have lined the roads at the Tour de Yorkshire ever since – it is not unrealistic over the eight days that the world championships will spend here.

There is cycling history here. In 2014 the Tour de France stage finish adjacent to West Park – the same one the worlds will use –was marked by a horrendous crash involving Mark Cavendish as Marcel Kittel rode to the stage win. More distantly, a stretch of the circuit over the twists and turns of Pot Bank formed part of the notoriously tough Pennypot Lane circuit, which was used regularly during the International Festival of Cycling here in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We used to use it for the regional championships,” reminisced one local cyclist, Chris Rhodes, “and whenever we came down through the hairpins someone would go straight on at the end and end up in the gateway.”

Tackling Pot Bank on an ebike borrowed from Chevin Cycles, tight right and left downhill over a bridge looked more than daunting before a rapid pull uphill, and that set the tone. After the right turn back towards the town centre, there are two more sets of tight bends and stiff little descents, each with a corresponding uphill leg breaker, before the final series of lefts and rights and the brief lungburster up to Betty’s just before the finish.

Most of the races in the world championships will start elsewhere, with the Harrogate circuit used for the final phases before the finish. It is part town centre criterium, part road race, meaning that, if conditions are wet, the constant corners could push bike-handling skills to the limit. “It’s brutal,” said the waitress in the Prologue cycle cafe. “It’s what we call ‘Yorkshire flat’.” That is to say, not very flat at all.

Riders make their way towards Bedale on stage one. Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images

The women’s road race here on 28 September is the major target of the season for Lizzie Deignan, who began her cycling just down the road in Otley. As the women’s race approached the circuit, the 30-year-old Deignan was prominent behind a six-rider escape, which provided a launch pad for the Australian Lauren Kitchen to win the world’s rehearsal sprint in Parliament Street.

A few kilometres later as the sextet passed Ripon Cathedral, 25km from the finish in Bedale, the roads were dry, the sun was doing its best to break through, the escapees were within reach of the bunch, and Deignan’s Trek-Segafredo team were persistently putting the pressure on, firing one rider after another up the road and continually stretching the peloton.

That set up a sprint finish in the centre of the North Yorkshire town, with Lorena Wiebes of the Netherlands springing clear as the road curved gradually uphill with 150m to the line. Britain’s Lizzy Banks claimed the Queen of the Mountains jersey ahead of her compatriot Leah Dixon.

Later in the day, the men’s stage closed with a similar scenario, with a six-rider escape swept up close to the finish. A chaotic mass sprint went to the German Rick Zabel, whose father Erik won the Tour de France green jersey seven years in a row between 1996 and 2002.