ROAD RUNNING IN THE LAND OF THE HIGH SKY; Where Jim Hall's Chaparrals find a parking space but not a resting place.

Byline: KEVIN A. WILSON

Saturday April 17 dawned bright and windy, the air such a palpable element of the west Texas environment that it made a man think that, "living here must have influenced the way Jim Hall's brain worked.''

That morning, Hall went to his garages at Rattlesnake Raceway, the track he built with Hap Sharp in the late '50s, lifted the gullwing door and climbed behind the wheel of the Chaparral 2F. It's a pretty modern-looking machine, this high-winged FIA endurance-racing coupe in which Phil Hill won the BOAC race at Brands Hatch in 1967. With his grandson riding shotgun, the racing pioneer fired the big 427 Chevy V8, roared through the parking lot and out the front driveway onto the scrub-lined west Texas public roads and headed for town. Driving under the I-20 overpass at exit 136, just before he got to Midland proper, he made a left onto the service drive, went a ways farther, then zipped up the big circle drive in front of the Petroleum Museum.

Half the town seemed to wait on him there, for the official opening of a new "Chaparral Gallery'' addition to the museum. This, the 2F's last flight before it settled into a parking space among its road-running siblings, could have been the shortest journey any visitor to the museum ever makes.

Several years ago Hall started looking for a place to park his collection of 25- to 40-year-old world-changing race cars, and had offers on the table from all over the country. It says something that they're together in Midland, hard by Rattlesnake Raceway but so far from anyplace else that residents think nothing of driving two or even four hours each way just to see a play or attend a fair.

"Sandy [Mrs. Hall] and I wanted to keep the cars together in a place that would tell the whole Chaparral story,'' Hall told AutoWeek a day before the gallery opening. "That meant we weren't going to sell the cars, one here and another there. Then these guys stepped up.''

Remoteness was an advantage back in the '60s when Hall was building his pioneering machines. "We didn't have to put up with a lot of people snooping around.'' But is that same isolation what you want for a museum?