Yeah i do get the impression that IVA testers are just glorified MoT testers, however you would like to think the people who wrote the manual would have the requisite engineering background............. one would hope....
There are GRP monococques out there, eg the Murtaya kit car and the GTM libra both of which use a basic (aka shit) chopped stranf mat based GRP chassis - aka decades old boat building technology
The impression i get with a lot of the bureacracy today is that because in "amatuer build" terms a carbon chassis is unheard of, i may come across problems because in essence people are scared of the unknown. And no one wants to be the person who signs off on something that could potentially crash and kill people later on - i imagine thats how it will be viewed.
Despite the fact that as a performance material (even in crashes) it out performs GRP in every way. Not to forget i will be adding in deliberate "crash structures" to the sills and front and rear using the motorsport industry standard of aluminium honeycomb based crash boxes.
Ironically a lot of the bonding data I can rob from lotus as they did extensive testing of structural adhesives when they designed the elise to the extent that the elise's alloy box section chassis is mostly bonded together rather than welding as they found the bonding was stronger, needing only the odd rivet here and there to prevent "peeling" of the bonded joint in heavy crashes.
Thing is I KNOW there is a lot of info out there in the top end motorsport scene on such construction but its very much a closed arena unless you have the right contacts. In fact information sharing in the advanced composites industry is fairly absent!! The company i work for has in some cases lost trade because we have an open policy of information sharing. Not saying we share information gained in confidence in contracts etc but theres a lot of knowledge on how to do x, y and z that people wont tell you, but they will happily charge you lots of money to make it for you - yet the same people get upset that we will tell customers how to do it themselves.