I think buying a part rated for 1000+ HP and installing it is hardly 'mucking about' with an unknown material.

 

Cobra, there's different kinds of manufacturing methods for a carbon shaft. Pre-fab bonded(stay away...) wound filament, wound filament in family tooling etc. Then there comes the issue of balance, not so much with damping since having the correct fiber orientation, the thing could be made to damp itself in some cases. Then there's survivability on a road car; running over something and having it ricochet around under the car or get jammed somewhere, might leave someone stranded if the thing brooms out.



Just because something comes out of a factory after making it to production, doesn't always mean its a good idea.



On a race car running on a prepared surface there's usually no problem with it since debris or large chunks of other cars are either fragile in themselves or get snowplowed away by the splitter, or everything's hiding under a load-bearing flat bottom which is sacrificial in itself. On the street, its different. Plenty of stuff around to cause funny failure modes i.e. wombat jammed under the car...





It might lead to that actually. i.e. how is the balance weight going to go on. These are usually tacked along the length of the shaft. With CF, it'll need to be bonded on. And some methods of manufacture don't take well to being bonded to after finishing. Unless of course, the thing comes balanced from the factory. The main worry, is that the shaft needs to be re-balanced at some point in its service life(usually means a call to tech support...)

 

I had a couple of "through the gravel" off track experiences in my Z. No failure or damage to the shaft. OEM's are not going to put a CF shaft in a car if it isn't at least as durable as aluminum.

 

The thing I would be worried about vs. this shaft vs. OEM is the manufacturing process. That heavily depends on the reputation of the manufacturer..



It is kinda like comparing a eBay Veilside kit to a true kit..



However, the manufacturer of the product seems to have a good reputation which would nix that worry.



Also, with a CF driveshaft, it isn't really about overall weight reduction AT ALL.. much more about the reduction in mass when the car is moving. Not about dropping the overall weight of the car.



I still would probably not venture into a modification like this unless money was disposable to me or I was tracking the car competitively and most other mods had been done.

 

I wouldn't go with carbon, ever. I've done a custom aluminum shaft on the 300zx. Came out great, was cheap $380, bulletproof, and very lightweight. You won't save much weight between the two. Put the $1600 somewhere else.