Imagine if there was a race -- but not enough competitors for the race to occur.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened with Top Fuel Harley at last weekend’s NHRA Mopar Xpress Lane SpringNationals in Baytown, Texas.

Only six competitors showed up, and by the time rain washed out all but the final pair of Top Fuel dragsters in the opening round Sunday morning, the Harley contingent of half a dozen teams were preparing to hit the road. The remainder of the classes completed the event Monday.

Instead, the planned Houston Top Fuel Harley show will become part of the NHRA FallNationals, set for Oct. 8-10 at the Texas Motorplex outside of Dallas.

It was a case of ‘if it could go wrong, it did’ for the Harley group at Houston. Combine a rain-soaked forecast -- one which became reality -- going head to head against an All Harley Drag Racing Association event in Rising Sun, Md., and it was almost a guarantee that there wouldn’t be a full eight-bike field at either site.

In short: Houston, we have a problem.

“I tried to get them to move it to Dallas before we even got there. They said no. They said they had advertised that we were going to race, so they couldn’t move it,” said Jay Turner, the 2017 NHRA national champion whose operation in Julian, N.C., also preps bikes for 2018-19 titleist Tii Tharpe and 2020 kingpin Randal Andras.

“We were ready to race on Sunday. Didn’t happen. Sunday was just washed out. Randal, Tii and Dave Larson, those three couldn’t be there on Monday anyway. If Randal and Tii couldn’t be there, I wasn’t going to be there.”

The reality of the slashed field was presented to NHRA’s Vice President of Competition, Ned Walliser, on Sunday morning by Tharpe and Andras. One of the companies Andras owns, AB Steel, put up the purse for the event.

“It’s easier to shrug somebody off by text or on the phone,” Tharpe said, “so we asked for a face to face and had a good conversation. It wasn’t like open arms, and it took a little talk and some phone calls to figure some stuff out.

“Ultimately the decision was made to let us pick up Dallas and kind of throw away Houston. It just didn’t make a ton of sense for us to race. Randal put up the money for that race, and we didn’t feel he had gotten the value he should’ve for the money.”

Rain inundated Texas during the week leading up to the race, and it was more than the grounds at Houston Raceway Park could handle, being that the facility is listed as being a mere 10 feet above sea level.

Rickey House, another Harley racer, is from Humble, Texas, located 35 miles from the raceway on the north side of Houston. That’s where his business, V-Twinn Cycles & Service, is located, and he knew well in advance that the race was going to suffer due to the weather.

“I was coming home from Charlotte” from the Four-Wide Nationals (May 14-16), House said, “and I hit rain about Gulfport (Mississippi) and it rained all the way home. That was Tuesday. It rained Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

“Ain’t nothing anybody could do about the weather. When you’re in this part of the country with the Gulf of Mexico right there and they’re calling for rain and there’s a big storm, it’s going to rain -- and it did.”

The call was made to shorten the event from two days to three, and the Top Fuel Harley racers were able to make only one of their scheduled two qualifying attempts Saturday.

When it became obvious that Sunday’s action was going to get soaked, too, and with at least half of the field unable to stick around for a Monday completion, NHRA had little choice but to relent to the racers’ request to pull the plug on their portion of the show.

“Wasn’t nobody having no fun, y’know?” said House, who owns V-Twinn Cycles & Services in Humble on the northern edge of Houston. House defeated Ryan Peery in the AMRA’s season opener in Belle Rose, La., earlier this year.

In the meantime, while NHRA was in Texas, AHDRA was in action at Cecil County Dragway in Maryland. As was the case at Houston Raceway Park, only five Top Fuel Harley riders were on hand for that event, which was won by Tracy Kile of Asheville, N.C.

Top Fuel Harley will likely be added to the program for the Heartland Nationals at Topeka, Kan., set for Aug. 13-15. Multiple Top Fuel Harley racers received a text Tuesday morning informing them that funding had been secured for Topeka and requesting a reply as to who could attend.

If Topeka isn’t added to the schedule, Top Fuel Harley isn’t slated to appear at an NHRA national event until the U.S. Nationals (Sept. 1-5 at Indianapolis), followed a week later by a stop at Maple Grove Raceway in Pennsylvania the ensuing weekend. The Top Fuel Harley guys will then conclude their portion of the season Oct. 7-10 at the Texas Motorplex.

“NHRA made the best of a bad situation in Houston, in my opinion,” said Bob Malloy of Media, Pa., the class record holder at 6.09 seconds. He was idle last weekend after incurring major engine damage at the Four-Wide Nationals on May 14.

“We need the NHRA. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, we had IHRA and AHDRA, and literally what it came down to was IHRA was the all-stars and the AHDRA was a building platform for the future all-stars or the people on the budget. So we actually need at least two of these sanctioning bodies to survive. …

“We’re all in this together, so whatever everybody agrees upon, I’m good with that. I want this to work.”

On deck next for many Top Fuel Harley racers is the AHDRA’s Nitro Summer Nationals, slated for June 5-6 at Rockingham (N.C.) Dragway. That will be an especially meaningful race for Tharpe.

“When I started Harley drag racing, I bought a bike and inherited a bunch of fans. I bought a Pro Mod bike that Country Maines and Scott Wood owned, and I kind of acquired their fans, too -- the Wood Pile. The Wood Pile, at Rockingham, they’ll fill up a whole section, and they’re so loud you can hear them over a damn fuel bike.”

Maines died last year, and in addition to a massive barbecue in Maines’ honor in the pits June 5, his ashes will be scattered at the track.