The beauty of composites is that you can tailor the layup to achieve the results you want. If you want more bending stiffness, add more plies of uni-direcitonal. More torsional stiffness, add more +/-45.
Lots of good engineering tools available now to perform analysis on composites too. Back in the day we used to have to do a lot of estimating in NASTRAN to get the right properties. Now you can plug in what fabric, how many plies and out comes a beautiful structural model. Frankly I'm shocked that there hasn't been more analytical work in RC cars. Still lots of flat plates of CF cut out with a water jet. I suspect that someday we will have more 3 dimensional composites and things will get very interesting.