JOLIET, Ill. -- He wondered if he'd ever find another job in the business. After all, teams were contracting, and people were being laid off. He tried to take a break from NASCAR, to clear his mind. But Jimmy Elledge couldn't hold off the creeping worry over whether anyone would want to hire him again.

Then Team Red Bull vice president Jay Frye called. And eight weeks after being fired from Chip Ganassi Racing, Elledge was a Sprint Cup crew chief once again.

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I had more information than I ever could have imagined. It seems like it just makes driving so much easier, because I love knowing what's going on. [Elledge's] experience level, it's great to have that and learn from that.

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A.J. ALLMENDINGER

"I was actually just really kind of bummed about getting fired. The whole Ganassi situation was just kind of a bad deal," Elledge said Saturday night at Chicagoland Speedway, after his first race on top of the box for A.J. Allmendinger and Red Bull's No. 84 team.

"I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I tried to stay away from racing or detached from it for a couple of weeks. It's just things you go through. And then I got paranoid that man, maybe I'm never going to get a job again. Maybe no one else wants you. I'm fortunate to have had choices. Right now there are more people being laid off and teams are shrinking. I was just kind of sitting back and thinking, man, I hope I have an option. Things started coming up. I had a lot of phone calls from a lot of people that spent a lot of time with me and talked to me a lot about their programs. This one just fit."

Elledge replaced Ricky Viers, who over the last year had shepherded the No. 84 program from one that had struggled to make races to one that now struggles to contend in them. In order for Allmendinger to take the next step, Red Bull management thought the second-year driver needed a crew chief with more experience. Elledge, a crew chief for a decade who earned a race win with the late Bobby Hamilton at Andy Petree Racing, fit the bill.

And Saturday night brought almost immediate results. Allmendinger started 39th, but Elledge made the gamble to stay out on a pit cycle, betting that the car was good enough to hang with the leaders. He was right -- Allmendiger ran with teammate Brian Vickers in the top 10 for much of the night, climbed as high as fourth, and had to settle for a 13th-place finish after his last pit stop of the race was a slow one. The result was one off his career-best finish of 12th, recorded June 8 at Pocono.

"I had more information than I ever could have imagined," Allmendinger said. "I knew exactly where I was running the whole time, what lap times I was running, what guys near me, behind me were running. It's just everything I could have asked for. It seems like it just makes driving so much easier, because I love knowing what's going on. [Elledge's] experience level, it's great to have that and learn from that."

It also makes Allmendinger, with just 28 Sprint Cup starts on his resume, feel like he has to carry less of the load.

"Knowing his experience level, I'm a lot more calm," he said of Elledge. "I'm always learning, but I don't want to feel like I have to be the experienced guy and know more than I should right now and have to make the calls. Of course, I'd love to get to that point. But heck, I'm still a rookie with how many races I've run. It's almost like, OK, I can go back to just driving the car. Tell [Elledge] what's wrong, he's going to make small changes, big changes, he's going to call the strategy, and I've just got confidence. It makes me stay calm."

Elledge had other options. But he liked how competitive the Red Bull cars were, liked how enthusiastically Kevin Hamlin, Vickers' crew chief and one of Elledge's old mates from their days at Richard Childress Racing, endorsed the move. "He didn't hesitate to say he loved it here and it was the best place he ever worked," Elledge said. "That kind of made me go, OK, this feels like the right thing to do."

And it helped erase some of the bitter taste from his time with Ganassi, where Elledge spent most of the last three seasons calling the shots for Reed Sorenson. Ganassi moved him to Juan Montoya's team this year in an attempt to breathe some life into his struggling organization. Soon afterward, following an argument with competition director Steve Hmiel, Elledge was out.

"I kept trying to tell myself that I knew it was going to be a positive when that happened. I really couldn't understand what that positive was going to be at the time," he said. "It's going to be for the better, and it's tuning out that way. It makes me not be so hard on myself with the decisions I make. I feel like this one is the right decision."

Runs like the one he and Allmendiger had Saturday night would seem to back that up. "You go through running bad, and you go through running bad for long periods of time, and you question yourself, if you've got what it takes," Elledge said. "That's where you have to be a little bit selfish and believe in yourself a little bit. I've done this stuff for a long time, and it was just time for a change."