Originally Posted by
PeteHski
Some fair points here. One advantage of carbon over metal is that it's the most versatile in terms of shaping and directional strength with layup design. In recent years the bike industry has matured enough to exploit these advantages pretty well. My background is in motorsport, where carbon has been used for much longer in chassis and suspension components. If I was looking for a bike frame to keep long term and expected it to get knocked around in transit etc then I would probably choose Ti. But otherwise it's carbon all the way for me now, both for mtb and road.
But a race car chassis is about 2 to 10 mm thick (depending where on the chassis it's being used) vs a bicycle frame that is about 0.5 mm thick depending on the cost of the CF bike, and it's this thin CF in a tube set that I can make bend inward with my bare hands. Also keep in mind that one of the reasons race cars went with CF is due to its ability to break apart absorbing the crash energy instead of the person absorbing it, they didn't choose it for weight because race cars have to meet weight restrictions and requirements. Bike manufactures on the other hand could care less about how the material handles a crash, all they care about is shape and weight.
Since you use to be involved in motorsports, please correct my errors above concerning the race cars.