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40 Motoring Heroes: Pioneers, Inventors, Mavericks, and Game Changers
> How did an English pub inspire a legendary road safety feature?
> Which F1 driver had to wear leg braces as a young boy in hospital, yet started his own winning team?
> What prompted a young woman from Alabama to invent the windscreen wiper?
> Who was the “bloody fool” from Yorkshire who master-minded the VW Beetle’s rise from the ashes of the Second World War?
40 Motoring Heroes offers a fact-filled, illustrated insight into motoring history, not only for petrol heads and motoring enthusiasts, but anyone with a passion for fascinating people. The little-known men and women featured include inventors, innovators, engineers, financiers, and others at the sharp end of automotive and social history. Their stories shine a light on ingenuity, determination, fights against prejudice, and even bravery, self-sacrifice and destitution.
Of course, being a motoring hero does not equate with sainthood or even likeability; a fair number of the book’s subjects demonstrated unpleasant human qualities but we acknowledge their professional achievements. Not all made fortunes out of their ideas, but their ideas added to the wealth of our enjoyment of motoring.
Compelling, intriguing and full of surprise, the must-read biographies in 40 Motoring Heroes showcase the struggles, adversity and perseverance of these motoring marvels.
The Motoring Heroes:
- Mary Anderson
- Bertha Benz
- Nils Bohlin
- Violette Cordery
- Tony Crook
- William Knox D’Arcy
- Rudolf Diesel
- John Boyd Dunlop
- Gilbern
- Alma Green
- Donald Healey
- John D Hertz
- Major Ivan Hirst
- Soichiro Honda
- Leslie Hore-Belisha
- Leslie Hounsfield
- Mercédès Adrienne Ramona Manuela Jellinek
- Camille Jenatzy
- Charles F Kettering
- Frederick W Lanchester
- Dorothy Levitt
- Rev. Peter John Lunati
- Bruce McLaren
- Garrett Morgan
- Pat Moss Carlsson
- Alex Moulton
- Ben Nevis (Versus Henry Alexander Jr.)
- Ransom E. Olds
- Gerald Palmer
- Armand Peugeot
- Dorothée Pullinger
- Billy Rootes
- Percy Shaw
- Alfred P. Sloan
- Charles E. Sorensen
- Freelan Oscar Stanley
- Preston Tucker
- Felix Wankel
- Margaret Wilcox
- Women Workers at Fords of Dagenham
About the author: Rod Ashley is a motoring enthusiast with a particular interest in automotive and industrial history. He has written many articles for the Road Transport History Association, of which he was a Director and the Chair, and has written extensively for Good Motoring magazine. Rod is also the author of Wolfram Wars: Exposing The Secret Battle in Portugal, published by Bennion Kearny, the holding publisher of Hawksmoor Publishing.
Publication date: 18 November 2025 | print and eBook formats available | £12.99 paperback | 214 pages
Hawksmoor Publishing is an imprint of Bennion Kearny, an independent British publisher founded in 2008 and based in Oakamoor, Staffordshire. We commission non-fiction from people who work in the fields they write about — coaches, practitioners, clinicians, lawyers, and academic researchers. Every title is commissioned, edited, and produced in-house, and our books are read right across the world. Bennion Kearny also publishes under the Oakamoor Publishing and Dark River imprints.
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