"Christ, Carbon Fibre is NOT the ideal material but I can easily see SOME exotic material being used of wildly thin 'walls,"
You don't need to go that far.
You thin the walls of the magnetic steel tube, you insert a grid tube ( a tube of fibers laid out with a 10mm mesh on a balloon mandrel (literally a ballon that you inflate to press the mesh against the inside of the tube.)
The result is a steel tube with characteristic one can tune for the purpose, likely to be both more flexible, mor resilient or directionally stiffer than steel.
It's a technique used for making lightweight racing bikes without going the whole composite fiber route. Also golfclub shafts and lightweight boat racing drive shafts.
The advantage is that the steel tube provides a graceful degradation in failure, rather than the complete collapse characteristic of composite alone.
They even make a specially 'hairy' fibre to improve the adhesion characteristics to the steel tube.
It produces a tube that is 1/3 lighter than the steel equivalent. You could knock 10 kg off the weight of a kart.
But of course it is only useful if it produces a performance advantage, creating a better driving platform, which one could do by proper design, since the weight has to meet the minimum weight of the kart.
Of course, you would have to duplicate a homologated chassis ... as no reputable firm would build one and stick a chassis plate on for you, would they?
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