Good point. However, if you look at the race history of the early fiberglass chassis cars, particularly the Chaparrals, which wee lighter than any of their comtemporaries, they crashed their cars often and repaired the tubs, glassing them back together, and putting them back into race service.
What I don't know is what their cars were made of; it's hard for me to believe that they were simply fiberglass and polyester resin, like a body shell from a Vette, for example. I don't know what was available in FRP technology then; this is before carbon fiber and Kevlar, etc, so they would have had E-glass (regular old fiberglass cloth etc) and possibly epoxy resin although not what we have now (West System, MAS, System Three etc).
To put this in perspective, the Chaparrals were racing in the early and mid-sixties. The first large fiberglass yacht hulls were built two or three years before that, and were overbuilt by today's standards, since no one knew how well FRP would hold up over the years. I don't know anyone who has seen the early FRP-chassis cars, but I sure would like to and find ut what sort of technology these guys used and how they did what they did. They were way ahead of their time, I believe. Compared to what was available to them, the number of choices of materials and methods of construction available today are enormous, but with the little they had, they won races.
