Geoff,
YES !!! (On most of your points.
)
However, I am a bit more of a bamboo and hemp sort of guy. No, not for smoking! Seriously, hemp used to be the gold standard for ropes amongst olden day sailors. Like bamboo, it is very fast growing, and very strong. These (and your balsa, kelp, +++) are the original composites.
Could a team realistically use hemp on an FSAE car? Well, look at
Henry Ford's Hemp Car (A cynical person might say that the grainy footage showing the sledgehammering of the body panels is due to attempted suppression of this information. After all, the OEMs don't want the buying public thinking that cars can be made crash proof.
)
Also good to see that others are realising that brown (= copper, walnut, Ferrari red, ++) can be a sexy colour!
~o0o~
Z