Less than one hour after the Beatson’s Mull Rally opened for entries, the list was full.

In fact, it only took 53 minutes to register an unprecedented 174 entries.

So overwhelming was the demand for places on Scotland’s only closed-road rally this year, the event’s mullrally.org website crashed.

The first 140 crews to register now have five days (that’s four and a bit now – the clock started ticking on Saturday morning) to pay the entry fee into the event’s very own account in Tobermory’s Clydesdale Bank.

Beatson’s Mull Rally clerk of the course Andy Jardine said: “I’m not sure what to say. Fifty-three minutes! We do all the work, get everything ready, but then at the end of the day – a couple of minutes before entries go live on the website – you inevitably think: “I wonder if anybody’ll come…”

They did. They came in their droves.

Deputy clerk of the course Iain Campbell added: “Has Coldplay ever been a sell-out in 53 minutes? Actually, if they only had 150 tickets to sell Chris [Martin] and the gang probably have.”

“But I’m not sure even Kim Kardashian has broken her website with new material as quickly as we did! It’s amazing.”

While the list of reserves for the event is already building, Jardine pointed out there’s still a chance of a run.

He added: “We’ve seen down the years that not everybody who gets an entry when they go live actually takes it up,” he said. “There will be some entries lost to broken engines, broken wallets, marriages… If the money’s not received from all 140 entries before close of play Tuesday, then we will start going down through the reserves and asking folk to join us in their place.

“This is a fantastic way for us to start the build-up for the golden anniversary of this event. We hoped we might be able to fill the entry – it took a day to fill the last one in 2016 – but this is so much more than we expected. Even though we haven’t run since 2016, it’s nice to see people haven’t forgotten us.”

*The Coldplay data might be wide of the mark