Peter Kennaugh, Chris Froome and Nicolas Roche all sit within 35 seconds of the race lead at the Criterium du Dauphine after Team Sky finished the team time trial in sixth position.

With Kennaugh starting the third stage in the leader's jersey, Team Sky were the last of 21 teams to roll down the start ramp in Roanne and set the fifth fastest time of the day as they passed through the 14km time split.

By that point, Wout Poels and Ian Stannard had both dropped back, and with Luke Rowe also getting detached soon after, five riders were left to tackle the uphill drag to the finish.

Froome, Kennaugh, Roche, Ian Boswell and Philip Deignan did just that, and their time of 30 minutes 33.21 seconds proved 35 seconds slower than BMC Racing, who had clocked a winning speed of 49km/h on the 24.5km course.

Astana meanwhile, took second place on the stage, four seconds adrift, with Movistar third, one second further behind.

Those results saw Rohan Dennis jump to the top of the general classification, despite sitting on the same time as his BMC Racing team-mate Tejay van Garderen, with five Astana riders four seconds back.

Kennaugh remains the highest-placed Team Sky rider in 19th position, with Froome and Roche in 24th and 25th positions respectively.

After the stage, Sports Director Nicolas Portal admitted things hadn’t run to plan on the day but insisted that there was still a long way to go in the battle for the yellow and blue jersey.

He told TeamSky.com: “It was a hard course but we’d been hoping for better. Our goal was to win the stage and the guys were really up for it, so we’re a bit disappointed with the result. We lost Ian [Stannard] before the split because he went off a little too hard, and Wout [Poels] is missing that race speed after his injury. Luke [Rowe] had been riding really strong but suffered a mechanical, and that meant we were down to five riders with 10km to go.

“It’s disappointing but we’ll obviously keep fighting. We have to ride aggressively now in the mountains stages, especially with the bonus seconds available. There’s still plenty to fight for, Froomey, Pete and Nico are only 35 seconds behind and we’ll make the race hard in the days to come and hopefully move up on the GC.”

“Obviously we were hoping for better day but we had a few issues out on the road. We went a little bit hard in the first part and blew a few guys there, and then we had one or two mechanicals in the mix,” Froome told reporters at the finish.

“There are a few things to learn there but it’s still early days in the race. Hopefully it’ll be hard days in the mountains. We’ll have to look at other parts of the race to make up that time.”

“It wasn’t perfect to be honest. There’s a lot we can learn from that going into the Tour de France for example," Rowe said. "We lost a couple of guys early on, it’s not ideal but that’s team time trialling. It happens. Then I had a mechanical and we were left with five guys left with the most important 10km of the race still to go.”

“It was just a case of us limiting our losses today. To lose 35 seconds after the mishaps isn’t a bad result. The race is only just beginning and we’ve got nothing to get our head down about. I still believe that we’ve got the race winner in our team and we’ll go out there and keep on fighting.”