The claim tested — "an exciting new venture in 1909: road racing"

The city's commissioned history makes a racing claim, and this section tests it as a claim. De Kever writes of the Simplex Motor Car Company that it "began an exciting new venture in 1909: road racing," that "Amplex achieved success at prestigious races, and its cars were among the fastest in the world." He names no race, no driver, and no date — and against the racing record, the sentences do not hold for the Mishawaka car. This pass tested them against the AAA championship trail of 1909 and 1910, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway meets of those years, the Vanderbilt Cup, the Elgin road races, and the Cobe Trophy: in every one of those records the racing Simplexes of 1908–1910 are the cars of the Simplex Automobile Company of New York — the Smith & Mabley line — driven by George Robertson, Joe Poole, Bert Basle, Howie Wilcox, and their peers, and winners at the first rank of the sport: the Brighton Beach 24-hour races of 1908, 1909, and 1910, the Lowell National Stock Chassis race of 1909, the Fairmount Park race of 1909. It was that New York marque's fame that had already forced Mishawaka's company to rename its car Amplex in 1910, as the automobiles section of this history prints. No American Simplex or Amplex of Mishawaka stands in any pre-1911 race record, and the documented competition record of the Mishawaka marque begins in February 1911, in the entry that follows. De Kever's sentences are printed here at the strength the record leaves them: a claim in the city's own history, uncorroborated by the racing record, whose every checkable element matches the documented record of a different company with nearly the same name.

• De Kever, history of Mishawaka: the sentences quoted, read first-hand
• The AAA championship record, 1909–1910, as compiled from The Automobile, Horseless Age, and Motor Age (Champ Car Stats / the Motor Sport Magazine data compilation): the Simplex entries are the New York company's, with drivers named
• The New York Simplex's documented wins — Brighton Beach 24-hour 1908–1910, Lowell National Stock Chassis 1909, Fairmount Park 1909: the Vanderbilt Cup and AAA race records
• The name collision and the 1910 renaming to Amplex: the automobiles section of this history