Oh you think Jim is joking? :tongue: ....
It just depends how dedicated/commited you are. For a lot of the teams, a good hit during the race week means game over. However, if you are in contention for chamionship points, or you have some factory sponsorship watching closely, you do everything possible to put the car at the front of the grid for every single race. We carry extra doors, fenders, carbon hoods, splitters, headlights, taillights, well.. everything. all painted and ready to go. Realtime at the pictured race above had (iirc) all 3 of their cars get damaged during a rainy practice at Atlanta. Two of them pretty good. One RSX with a good bit of rear damage (I think) and the Integra above (spun and went into the wall headfirst. Smashed in the left side pretty good.
Immediately after the session the car came in and within an hour or two the front half of the car was stripped, motor and all. Late afternoon a flatbed wrecker shows up at the track and drags the car off and the team goes to work on the RSX. A couple of techs from some local car dealership's body shop volunteered their services on the integra and stayed up all night straightening the car and hammering wheelwell and apron back into compliance. The next morning ~ 9 am we see the wrecker roll back in and offload the car. Within a couple of hours new bodywork is hung, motor and stuff is reinstalled and the car is ready to go again for qualifying. The picture above is after qualifying
That time it took out the right half of the car. After some major sledgehammering and yanking on the framerail they decided to retire the car for the weekend, as they weren't going to be able to get the car straight enough to race the next day; plus they had other damage to take care of on the other two more important cars.
The paddock is a very helpful community I must add. We loan a lot of parts and stuff to other teams, and generally everyone wants to see the other teams get out there.
Regarding the chassis... Yes, a lot of work goes into them, but it takes a pretty serious hit to really deform the core structure, or mess with the cage. The most we usually have to do is quarter panel replacement, rocker replacement, trunk floors, stuff like that. In some cases, the chassis repair goes a lot further than it would normally, simply because they are worth so much! 5k at the bodyshop is cheaper than building another one
One of the team's cars last year went into the wall head-on hard enough to push the unibody back into to the a-pillar and fold up the passenger-side floor. The car was repaired and straightened within a week I believe for another race. It isn't unheard of to just completely front-clip an entire car from the firewall forward and just replace it with the front half of a sacrificial car. (we keep a few of those around)
andris