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The Mini Disc System (thereafter abbreviated MD) was recently announced as a new recording media. MDs have various new features, and are a widely anticipated music media for home, portable and automotive use. In accordance with the wide acceptance of CD changers for automotive use, the compactness of MD cartridges allow the development of a single DIN size MD changer which can be installed in a car dashboard. (Figure 1) The MD changer described in this paper does not use magazines like a CD changer. Instead, four discs are loaded one by one and stored in the MD changer enabling either continuous or select playback. An even greater feature of this MD changer is it's capacity to allow users to load an additional disc for direct playback while the other four discs are stored in the changer.

This paper describes the effort initiated by the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR), and joined by General Motors Corporation (GM), Ford Motor Company (Ford) and Roush Industries, Inc. (Roush) to develop and manufacture a roof mounted aero flap system (referred hereafter as “roof flaps”) for race car applications. This system addresses the problem of how to greatly reduce the severity of accidents involving spinning race cars by means of preventing aerodynamic lift-off. There were several NASCAR race car accidents in 1993 that involved cars which became airborne. A variety of tests and procedures, both inside and outside the wind tunnel environment, were conducted to evaluate and consider possible solutions to this problem. Ultimately, a roof flap system was produced that has significantly reduced extreme yaw lift in race cars.