What you cant see here is that the front pan has some minor rust.  Someone had actually welded 1/8" steel plates to either side of the suspension pickups.

It looked like a small job to fix a few small holes and be done with it.  What I didn't realize was that someone had basically reconstructed the entire horseshoe out of fiberglas resin.  Now that's hard to weld to!
 

Now to fix the front pan.  The previous owner had the front a-arm mounts reinforced with 1/8" steel plate then filled the cross member with fiberglass resin.  Judging by the lovely floor pan I was not surprised.

I hammered out all the fiberglass resin then tied the front a-arms mounts together with angle iron and sheet metal. Weight is not a particular concern since the car needs to meet minimum weight for club race as an SC.

What I didn't notice were all the other rust holes in the nose.  What looked like solid metal in the driver's corner of the tub turned out to be held together only with paint and undercoating!  We ended up removing a piece about 3" high but 10" long.

All the bad material was cut out with a plasma cutter and patches made.

It's really ugly, but it's definitely not going anywhere, and no one's likely to see it.