Crashes does not stay after the race is over, finito, end of.
This is both true, and very wrong.
The way it's true:
If you race in an online race with "damage on"... The damage to your car is NOT remembered after the race. (Some mysterious unseen mechanic fixes it in a flash after the race ends.)
This unseen mechanic doesn't rebuild the chassis though!
We're not talking about "damage" here. We're talking wear & tear on the car leading to poor performance due to need for chassis rebuild.
You see this is interesting, one guy on here the other day said no matter how often you crash a car it will not shorten the life of a chassis.
Who is right? I would have thought crashing does damage the chassis, and not just relentless high speed cornering.
All I can tell you is that I've tested this. (And so has my boyfriend who is good and knows about real cars as well as this game... just in case you dismiss what I have to say on basis of my gender. LOL)
If you bump other cars, or the walls, or crash, a lot, the car starts handling "different" or "badly" compared to how it used to, a lot faster than if you race clean with no crashes.
In other words, you can get more miles out of it if you don't drive it hard around turns, bump, scrape, or crash.
I have also noticed that older model cars, especially antiques, and high performance cars... or antique performance cars... will lose chassis rigidity faster than other cars - say newer model or brand new road cars.
There's another thread about this here:
https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/showthread.php?t=184371
And yes, you CAN get a car to the point where it is "undrivable" - in the sense it won't seem to perform to your tuning... as if you've changed the tuning to something bad... as if there's something just OFF about the handling to what you remember it being like.
IMHO, if you're not noticing a difference in handling, and your lap times in a car are not noticeably decreasing from what they used to be in the car... well, just don't bother with the chassis rebuild - you probably don't need it.
But if your car starts feeling like the handling is wrong - when you'd tuned it before & it was handling well before... or if you're suddenly getting lesser lap times in the car... the chassis rebuild might be a good idea.
Append note: Also, excessive hard braking, as well as herky jerky steering, probably wears the chassis quicker too. This would totally explain why I seem to need chassis rebuilds much more often than most players... I hard brake way too much, and I steer herky jerky. (for instance, I have to play with the steering sensitivity MUCH LOWER than my boyfriend does! And in the license tests - I got gold the 1st time all the late-braking tests because I late brake unintentionally all the time! )
