A first look at the crash site from an engineer who does accident investigations offers a few clues to what happened:
I do talk to a white-haired man with small, even white teeth, who's been strolling around the site with a few inches of tape measure sticking out of one fist. None of the newspeople is paying any attention to him. He's an engineer who works in a building nearby. He came out here the first day and took pictures. The engineer's son is a "pro drifter," and he came out, too, and it was pretty clear to both of them what had happened. The whole story's written on the pavement, the engineer says. He asks me not to use his name, says it wouldn't be right for him to go on the record spouting off, that it might muddy the waters if there's ever an official investigation.
The engineer does accident investigations — deep-sea shipwrecks, air crashes. That's what this reminds him of, he says, an air crash. We walk up and down for almost 40 minutes and he shows me things about the site. Telltale signs. The boarded-up second-story window in the building behind the crash site, broken by a piece of the car — the starter, everybody's saying. This is how you know how fast they were going. For the starter to have broken a window 120 feet from where the car hit the pole, the engineer says, the car would have to have been traveling at 120 mph or more. Basic physics, the engineer says.
We walk down the hill, and he shows me the Carrera's tire marks on the pavement, tells me about the difference between a skid and a scuff. A skid is the kind of transfer of rubber that happens when a car is stopping; a scuff is what you get when a tire is locked and juddering sideways across the pavement. These are scuffs, the engineer says. From the scuffs, and the way the two tracks converge on the pavement, and a red-paint scrape-mark where the low front spoiler on the GT might have clipped the curb, it's pretty clear the car was in an "evasive slide" when it hit the pole. Like what you might do — and I say "might," as the engineer took pains to — were you a skilled driver trying to avoid hitting something while traveling at over 120 mph.
The engineer holds his cell phone out flat, turns it in the air, shows me how the mass of the car would have brought it around. He thinks the pole hit the driver's side first, then spun the car into the trees. Which means the notion that Walker died instantly — in the crash, not the fire — may be wishful thinking.
"Morbid ****************," the engineer says, when I ask him if he has noticed the collectors on the hillside. Not to mention that this is still technically a crime scene. The engineer says he saw the police taking a few measurements that day, but he hasn't seen anybody take a picture of the paint scrape on the curb yet. The engineer thinks that, as a car guy, Walker would want people out here, figuring out what had happened.
"He understood the physics of cars, and I think he would expect car enthusiasts to come out here and analyze it. And learn from it. So it doesn't happen again. It certainly has changed the way the drift kids are thinkin' right now. They're all scared ****************less. Young kids, they've got a drift club here in town. It's a wake-up call for them. They use this guy's lifestyle as a role model. So that's a big event for these car enthusiasts. Especially my son — he's pretty upset right now. You feel a kindred spirit, like you're connected to the guy. It's had a traumatic effect. I mean, look at this — were you here yesterday? There were like a thousand people here yesterday."
Dead Man's Curve: The Scene at Paul Walker's Crash Site and the Way We Mourn Now - Hollywood Prospectus Blog - Grantland