HL publishing, retries and potential race condition

Hello Apache Kafka community,

When trying to publish (using high level sync producer) a message on a
non-existing topic (with implicit topic creation enabled), with
message.send.max.retries set to 1, sending will fail with
FailedToSendMessageException (and LeaderNotAvailableException swallowed).

Am I doing something wrong, are my expectations wrong that this should work
without exception thrown, or is this a known Kafka (with ZooKeeper as
storage) issue?

I'm using Kafka 0.8.1.1.

Kind regards,
Stevo Slavic.