LEEDS, Ala. – When the rains finally came again Monday afternoon at Barber Motorsports Park, Sebastien Bourdais went from being a driver sitting in the cat bird’s seat for a potential victory to being a passenger just hanging on for dear life.

Bourdais, race engineer Craig Hampson and team owner Dale Coyne made the call to gamble when the skies opened in the final 20 minutes of the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama, staying out for nearly six laps on slick tires in an effort to stay off pit lane.

In doing so, Bourdais held as much as a 13-second lead over race-long dominator Josef Newgarden during that stretch, with Newgarden having pitted for rain tires with 15 minutes to go and trying to maintain as much speed as possible to finish the deal in his own right.

Had Bourdais been able to hang on, he would have been in position to capture his second Verizon IndyCar Series win of the season, but the worsening weather ultimately made that avenue impossible to navigate.

Bourdais finally had to bail out with seven minutes and 26 seconds remaining in the 75-minute timed event, coming in for wet-weather Firestone tires and fading back out of contention to fourth as he came off the pit lane.

From there, Bourdais quickly lost a spot to Robert Wickens on cold tires and faded back even further after that, hanging on to fifth by just .0871 of a second at the checkered flag after a drag race with fellow four-time champion Scott Dixon.

Meanwhile, Newgarden went on to win the race, his second of the Verizon IndyCar Series season.

Afterwards, Bourdais was visibly despondent at losing out on the chance to score another victory, citing his last set of tires as the reason he dropped anchor in the closing stages.

“We completely lost the wet tires. I have no idea why,” said Bourdais. “The last two laps, I was losing something like two seconds a lap … which didn’t really matter at that point because we were out of contention, but we were in it to win it and did everything we could.”

Bourdais believed strongly that had the weather not intervened, he likely would have come out on top of Newgarden for the victory. He was 23 seconds and change behind Newgarden when the eventual winner pitted for rain tires, with roughly a 27-second pit delta needed to make a splash-and-go stop.

But in the end, the rain was simply too much to overcome.

“It was seemingly going to be good enough, because I had saved a load of fuel and wasn’t going to have to save very much once Josef had done his splash (and go stop),” lamented Bourdais. “I thought we had beaten him, honestly, but the sky opened and that was that.”

Coyne was slightly more realistic in his comments after the race, refusing to confirm or deny whether his driver might have won the race but equally frustrated with the turn of events that was out of their control.

“We were in the cat-bird’s seat for second,” said Coyne. “When it rained again we were just hoping Sebastien could hold on. He did some good times on the drys in the wet, but the wet just kept coming, so we finally had to bring him in.”

“Newgarden did come in for his splash of fuel, but that was when he put his wets on and he had it after that. Because everyone had to come in, it erased our chance. If it had stayed dry, we’d have won the race, but everyone had to come in because of the weather and that gave him the fuel he needed.”

For the Frenchman behind the wheel, he gave it all he had to the point that their strategy was broken, but Bourdais admitted that the conditions were “extremely sketchy” in the closing laps.

“It just kept getting worse and worse and worse,” Bourdais stressed. “Dale wanted to go for the win. I tried to give It my best, but it bit us.

“It lost us more positions in the end, so it wasn’t the right thing to do, but we were determined to fight to the end for it.”

Bourdais leaves Barber third in the championship, 39 points back of Newgarden. He is tied with Graham Rahal but holds the tiebreaker due to his win in March at the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.