Team Tuesday collects legends like bus tickets on the way home

Eight Local Legends in one leg is not a typo, it is what happens when Team Tuesday decide to make a point on the way home. From the foot of Gibson Street to the top of Coach Lane, Iain hoovered up crown after crown, and the general classification will remember this stage long after the legs have forgotten it.

The headline segment has to be Gibson Street itself, the hill this Tour is built around: short, steep and unavoidable, and Iain took it in 2:07, a mere 79 seconds off the best time ever posted there. That sounds like a gap until you remember what Gibson Street actually is - a wall dressed up as a road, over in under a minute and felt for ten - and that the traffic-light-trimmed version of the same climb also fell to him along the way. Taking the full climb and its variants in the same afternoon is the kind of quiet domination that does not show up on a start sheet.

The warm south-westerly breeze sat behind or across for most of the leg, and on Byker Bridge, the one place in this Tour where the weather always gets a say, it did Iain a favour rather than a mischief. No drama there today, just tyres changing note onto the deck and off it again, the city stacked up in bridges to the left as he went through.

With Team Tuesday now sitting top of the general classification at 23.5 km/h across their legs, this was the day the lead went from promising to imposing. The Metronomes are living up to the name: never spectacular in a single number, but relentlessly, quietly, everywhere at once. The rest of the week has been put on notice.