I have a friend who is a packaging engineer, and he told me about his investigation into using cardboard in a racing sidecar outfit. If you only want to use it for a limited amount of time in dry conditions, you could just about get away with it. If it were used for too long, the fibres in the board would separate, and any water ingress at all would be catastrophic.
The Aston car is good in the way that it shows an understanding of the construction process which other prototypes fail to address; too many clever designs fall at the hurdle of cost effectiveness.
