How many chains do you think a pro team goes through in a year? It’s about 1,000. Gels? About 15,000. And how many men does it take to change the pressure washer in a team bus? About eight (if you include me, standing around and making helpful suggestions).

Cyclist is at the Trek-Segafredo service course in Deinze, Belgium, and a large kerfuffle has erupted as the team bus has just arrived back from the Tour de Suisse. This doesn’t happen often, and the service course is usually a calming place – a warehouse stocked with order, tranquillity and all the bike parts you could ever dream of.

The service course is a pro team’s base of operations, where everything is kept to run the team throughout the year. Service courses are the true départs and arrives of the Tour de France, and most are based within a few miles of each other.

'Sky is on the other side of town, BMC and Quick-Step are over by Ghent and between us are Lotto,’ says Freddie Stouffer, TrekSegafredo’s operations manager. ‘If you drew a circle around all the racing that happens in Europe, especially Belgium, the centre of it would pretty much be on Deinze. There are also big roads around here, so it’s easy to get things in and out. Plus it’s pretty secluded, so no one is going to find us and steal all our stuff.’ And just how much stuff are we talking? ‘We have two big buses, two big trucks, 12 team cars, two sprinter vans and two minivans; they all have to live somewhere. And then there’s all the bikes.’

The here and now

When there’s no racing taking place, the service course is home to at least 150 fully kitted-out race bikes, hundreds of pairs of wheels plus helmets, jerseys, shorts, socks, shoes, gloves, casualwear… the list goes on.