Ashley Force: The New Face of Drag Racing

Ashley Force has been the most important victory in the record-setting NHRA drag-racing career of John Force. Considering he has brought home 121 victory trophies and 14 NHRA championships in his long career, this is a significant statement.

Yet John Force has never been as emotionally unhinged as he was in April of 2006 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway when his daughter Ashley, then age 24, successfully completed the licensing procedure to become eligible to compete in the NHRA Funny Car division.



It's a girl thing
John Force's career path began unremarkably. Raised in a working-class home in Los Angeles, the hyperkinetic Force bounced from job to job as a young man before his uncle's interest in drag racing trickled down to him. He began a long, arduous odyssey to secure himself a place in the maelstrom of professional racing while simultaneously trying to provide for his wife, Laurie, and four daughters — Adria (from a previous marriage), Ashley, Brittany and Courtney.

"I wasn't the stay-at-home kind of dad you saw on television shows back then," admits Force, as he relaxes in the lavish Prevost motor coach that serves as his command center at the 23 annual NHRA national events in which he competes. "I'd be on the road for a couple of weeks and when I came home, a little girl would walk in front of me while I was lying on the couch. I didn't know my kid was walking already. I'm thinking that someone else's kid was visiting."

Since sons were in radically short supply in Force's family, the question lingered as to whether there would be any progeny to carry on the family's legacy on the quarter-mile.

"I never tried to push any of the girls into racing," Force insists. "As they grew older and my team began enjoying more success, they began to see how exciting the sport was and that there were some real opportunities available to them. But the payoff for me was that we now had something we could do together and it helped me to reconnect with my kids. We couldn't get back all the time we missed when I was just starting out, but we could really take advantage of the time we have now."



Ashley's star rises
Once it became clear that Ashley, now 25, Brittany, 20, and Courtney, 19, were serious about becoming racers, Force and his tightly knit John Force Racing, based in Yorba Linda, California, mapped out a methodical strategy to transform each of them into competitive racing drivers.

Thus far, Brittany and Courtney have done their racing in the Super Comp class, a sportsman-level category dominated by gasoline-fueled V8-powered dragsters that cover the quarter-mile in less than 9.0 seconds at close to 160 mph. Meanwhile, Ashley graduated from Super Comp in 2005 to Top Alcohol Dragster, 2,000-horsepower machines that ring up 5.0-second elapsed times and trap speeds of 270 mph. After a successful 2006 season, she's made the leap to nitromethane-fueled Funny Cars this year.

The leap did not go unnoticed by the media, including mainstream outlets. Once drag-racing's winningest driver put his college-educated daughter (California State University at Fullerton) into the driver seat of an 8,000-horsepower, 330-mph Ford Mustang, it ignited countless network television interviews, a fusillade of magazine features, and perhaps most notably, a weekly reality series on the A&E network, Driving Force.



"It's very exciting," beams Ashley. "One thing has led to another and sometimes the pace and the demands of driving the car, learning what I need to learn and taking care of the commitments that go along with what we do can be tiring. But my dad has been doing it a lot longer than I have, and it helps to know he's not asking me or anyone else to do something he can't."

A rookie's rocky road
Ashley's rookie season is in its embryonic stages and it's panning out with the relentless crush of NHRA competition and the insatiable obligations of sponsors, media and fans. She also has the pressure of racing against not only her father but also team drivers Eric Medlen and Force's son-in-law Robert Hight.

At the season-opening Winternationals in Pomona, California, she intrepidly qualified for her first professional field, fighting her way back into the 16-car eliminations ladder in the final qualifying session after being bumped out moments earlier by her dad. But in the first round of eliminations, she was beaten by teammate Hight.

At the following race in Phoenix, Ashley rocked in qualifying with an impressive 4.730-second pass, good for the No. 6 slot, and outperforming Dad's 4.818. But again she failed to pick up her first career win in the elimination rounds when she was upended by Bob Gilbertson.

The Gatornationals in Gainesville, Florida, wasn't a tour de force for the freshman driver, either. After struggling through qualifying and landing the No. 13 slot, things took a brief swing in a positive direction when Ashley defeated Jeff Arend in the opening frame, her first elimination-round win as a pro.

But in Round 2 while racing Phil Burkart Jr., and apparently on her way to another win light, her Castrol GTX Mustang got loose as she neared the finish line and veered into the retaining wall. Ashley was unhurt, but thoroughly dejected by the automatic disqualification and the damage sustained by her racecar.

Heart like a wheel?
"I'm still on that learning curve that just seems to be getting longer," she said moments later. "There's a lot more left for me to learn and I'll just keep using these disappointments as important lessons that I hope will keep making me a better driver."

"She'll be fine," concurs the elder Force. "It's a tough game out here. I've basically given her all the advice and the best team I can surround her with. Now it's up to her to go as far as her talent can take her. And I think it's going to take her a long way."