It’s all about efficiency. You really need to nail aerodynamics and to do that you’ve really got to invest in training your position. You’ve got to understand what does and doesn’t make a difference, which means time in wind tunnels, and then after that you’ve got to have the courage to go and do dress rehearsals at race pace.

Essentially you’ve got to take the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life, then go and do it in training over and over again, for half-an-hour or more at a time. Mentally that’s one hell of a thing to go and do in training, but it’s the only way to make sense of what you need to do to achieve the distance.

In terms of aerodynamics, your equipment is an issue, but the bike is only 20 per cent of the frontal area, and there’s only so much you can do with it in accordance to the current UCI regulations, so the biggest impact on aerodynamic performance is the rider themselves and the only way you can really improve that is in the wind tunnel.

I’ve been in the wind tunnel with Alex Dowsett, right at the start of his career, and he’s one of the few people we looked at who we thought, ‘there’s not much we can do here’. He’s very intuitively aware of aerodynamics and his position, and the wind tunnel confirmed what he’s already doing. It’s why people like Alex are such good time triallists. Yes, they can produce the power, but they have a sense of what works.

In terms of gearing, you don’t decide on gearing, you decide on cadence, and you then choose the gear accordingly. It sounds pedantic but it’s about cadence first and if you look over the years then most people seem to gravitate around 100RPM, regardless of the speed.