The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1909 · A SUPERLATIVE WITH NO TRACK UNDER IT
The claim: The city's commissioned history carries a sentence of real grandeur: that Mishawaka saw road racing in 1909, with cars from the city “among the fastest in the world.” If true, it would name a famous ground — a course, a stretch of road where the world's speed was made. The racing record of this history tested the sentence element by element, and its verdict governs everywhere the sentence is echoed: it fails as written. Every checkable element of the claim matches the record of the New York Simplex — the other Simplex, the big New York car whose racing fame was genuine — and not the Mishawaka Amplex, whose one documented season is 1911: fourth at Portola in February of that year, and the Indianapolis 500 in May, where the Mishawaka-built car #12 finished eighth and its stablemate #44 wrecked, killing the riding mechanic Sam Dickson — the first fatality in 500 history, carried whole in this history's automobiles record.
The ground: There is none, and the record says so in terms: no race track of any kind has stood on Mishawaka ground in any era — the valley's ovals are all boundary, in other cities' files — and no course, date or driver supports the 1909 sentence. Mishawaka's real racing fame is real but differently shaped: it is a machine's fame, not a place's — the cars were built here and raced elsewhere, at Portola and Indianapolis. A fame with no ground cannot be given one by this chapter. The sentence stands in the commissioned history; the verdict stands here, and the two are printed side by side, which is the whole of the matter.
Sources:
- The racing record of this history — the 1909 sentence tested and failed as written; the New York Simplex match, element by element; the no-track verdict for Mishawaka ground in any era.
- The automobiles record of this history — the Amplex whole: the 1911 season, the Portola fourth, the Indianapolis 500, car #12 eighth and Sam Dickson, the 500's first fatality.