He works alone. The chatter and background euro-pop radio from the factory floor briefly whispers in whenever the door opens, but inside here there is calm and silence, broken only by the sounds of a craftsman at work.

Johan Vranckx is a man of few words, but with a welcoming kind smile and a warm strong handshake he proudly shows me around his workshop, the true heart of the Eddy Merckx factory.

“Eddy picked me, took me on from school, so now I have been here 35 years, since I was 16. It is my dream job.”

After his skills were spotted by Merckx, he was sent on to see Ugo De Rosa, the man who taught Eddy, the man who Eddy regarded as the best. For two months Johan cut his teeth with the master before returning to start his time here. Now he is the last of the frame builders in the factory, Johan solely responsible for all of the Merckx steel passing out of the doors.

“I enjoy the welding the most. It takes one day and a half to make one frame, but I make a few at a time. First I cut all the tubes, then I weld.”

“He comes in here, we talk,” he says, pointing to a picture of Merckx on the wall, “Eddy is a good friend now, and obviously after 35 years it’s more, you know?”

“He comes here, down here to the workshop, this is his area more than the offices upstairs.” Indeed, Eddy is still one of the first to test ride all of the new models that bear his name, the high end carbon range still assembled here in Brussels by the all-Belgian team of mechanics, the colour schemes finalised in the on-site spray booth.

Johan turns and picks out tubes from the stocked high shelves for the next few builds, places them with care next to the dropouts and BB’s in the uniformly lined boxes behind us. I sense I’m stopping him from his work so thank him for his time. I look back while I close the door behind me for a final thank you but he is already back to it, back to what he was obviously born to do.