(4) Michael Hastings crashed his car at 4:25am on a Tuesday morning. While there are many allegations, what we do know is that the vehicle hit a palm tree at high speed and burst into flames, and that the engine skidded about 50 or 60 yards down the street after the impact.*****
My understanding is that the engine and tranny were located about 150 to 200 ft away from the crash site. The funny thing is that they were located along the path the car had taken before impact. Meaning separation from the chassis had to occur prior to impact with the tree. Also photos appear to indicate the car didn’t crash into the palm tree but came to rest against the palm tree.
Laws of physics would dictate the engine assembly could not have separated as a result of impact with the tree given the engine’s location. If so, it would have continued on in the direction of travel at the point of impact which was away from the street and beyond (not before) the point of impact.
I’m certainly no fan of Rolling Stone and I know very little about Hastings, but the crash scene bears little resemblence to a simple head on collision.
That's an assumption. It did not "have to" occur prior to impact. It could have occurred upon impact and those components could have ricocheted off the tree (or a kerb or any other deflector) back along the path.
Also photos appear to indicate the car didn’t crash into the palm tree but came to rest against the palm tree.
A still photo taken after the fact, by its very nature, cannot demonstrate that to be the case.
Laws of physics would dictate the engine assembly could not have separated as a result of impact with the tree given the engine’s location.
Which laws are those, now, specifically?
If so, it would have continued on in the direction of travel at the point of impact
Unless it hit something, like a sturdy tree, in which case it would not have.
the crash scene bears little resemblence to a simple head on collision
The photos do not show that it was a head-on, 90 degree angle collision.
I don't think anyone is claiming that this was a "simple head on" collision.
The story that the engine ended up behind the vehicle instead of launched ahead of it came from a dumba** reporterette from San Diego Channel 6 who got it wrong:
Based on the photos available so far, we do not know the exact angle and point of impact. The arrow drawn on the picture I just looked at is just that - an arrow drawn on a picture.
Based on the many (and there have been many) automobile crashes and post-crash scenes I have witnessed, cleaned-up, and/or been a party to, nothing in that picture - not the engine, not the debris field, not even the front driver’s side wheel/tire assembly - is situated in a manner as to lead me to suspect anything other than a high speed impact with a tree, in the median, at some angle between approximately 30 and 60 degrees to the original direction of travel.
I have to agree with ‘wideawake’ on this one. It appears to me that the conspiracy-theorists are jumping the gun on this one (at least based on the information available so far - and with the caveat that I, of course, was not there and did not witness the event).
Claims of bombs and pre-crash explosions aside, I once had a crash quite similar to the one in question (at least as it has been described in the media). I drove a small European sport sedan more-or-less head-on in to the end of a highway guardrail (after crossing from the right to the left side of the road) at about 110 mph. While in my case the engine did not detach from the chassis, other parts of the car ended up as far away as 350 feet from the point of impact, and they were not situated in a straight line along the direction of travel at impact. They were spread out in a sort of ‘fan’ pattern.
When a car is turning (rotating about its vertical axis)during a crash, the path of any parts/debris which fly off will describe an arc in three dimensions, the length and radius of the arc, and its angle(s) in the horizontal and vertical planes, will be dependent upon the force of impact and the rotational forces acting on the car at the time of impact, and on the part in question at its time of departure from the vehicle (as well as the size, weight, shape and drag coefficient of the part, of course).
The bottom line is, the disintegration of an automobile after a high speed impact is a complicated ‘dance’ with the laws of physics, and its results can seem very strange and can be difficult to explain.
As far as the location of the driver’s side wheel/tire assembly goes, when a wheel/tire detaches from a vehicle during a crash, it is absolutely impossible to predict its subsequent behavior, especially if it continues rolling and or has other parts still hanging off of it (such as hubs, brake rotors, tie-rods, etc).
I once found a wheel/tire/brake assembly from a Mazda RX-7 12-15 feet up in a tree, almost directly perpendicular to the vehicle’s path at impact, about 250 feet away from and on the opposite side of the car (this was following a high-speed crash on a road racing course where I was working as a Corner-Marshall). I witnessed the crash, and I still have no idea how the wheel & tire ended up in that tree.