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Although she is featured in national print ads for Oakley's Riddles sunglasses and is one of the stars of Driving Force, a new real-life series on A&E Network, the 23-year-old is most at home in the cockpit of a race car.
Currently the standout driver of the 275 mile per hour Castrol dragster, a purpose-built hybrid in which she is contesting the 2006 NHRA Top Alcohol championship, she is poised to move up in classification at the wheel of a 7,000 horsepower drag racing Funny Car in which she already has tested at 315 mph.
That's pretty heady stuff for a former high school cheerleader who studied television and film at California State University-Fullerton.
Ashley comes by her "need for speed" quite honestly. It's all in the genes.
Her father, John Force, is the 13-time NHRA Funny Car champion and world record holder for quarter mile time (4.665 seconds) and speed (333.58 mph); the only drag racer to have won as many as 100 NHRA tour events (119).
Her sisters, Brittany, 19, and Courtney, 17, both driver Super Comp dragsters. Even her mother, Laurie, is licensed to drive competitively. The irony is that Ashley isn't motivated by a desire to succeed her father, but rather to beat him.
"I'm going to mess with him on the starting line," she joked. "I think a lot of drivers are intimidated (by American motor racing's 1996 Driver of the Year), but to me he's just dad. He'll be so worried about his little girl in the other lane that by the time he recovers, I'll be gone. At least that's how it is in my dreams."
Although she is projected as a 2007 Rookie-of-the-Year candidate in Funny Car, the elder Force has insisted that there is no specific time table for his daughter's assimilation into a category in which a woman has never reached the winners' circle.
"She needs seat time," said the driver of the Castrol GTX Ford Mustang. "When she's ready, she and 'Guido' (crew chief Dean Antonelli) will know it. Until then, her main responsibility is to (Jerry) Darien and (Ken) Meadows and the Castrol dragster."
Her Funny Car orientation, which began in 2005, accelerated this year when she began driving a new McKinney Corporation slip-tube chassis built to address her specific requirements. Previously when she tested, she drove her dad's Ford Mustang, a situation that proved unsatisfactory on two fronts.
No. 1, she was uncomfortable, physically, because of all the cockpit adjustments that had to be made to accommodate the difference in their physiques and, No. 2, she was uncomfortable, psychologically, because the car she was driving wasn't a back-up; it was the same Mustang in which her dad was chasing another NHRA championship.
Since moving to the new car, she's made incredible progress.
"She has a unique feel for the car," Antonelli said, something he attributes to her apprenticeship in Super Comp and Top Alcohol. "The truth is we've been holding her back (because) we want her to feel what it's like to have tire shake and dropped cylinders (a condition in which the engine isn't firing on all eight cylinders) at different points on the track.
"John's game plan is to get her in the program next year," Antonelli said, "but he's not going to green-light anything until he's comfortable with her ability to handle the car."
In her rookie season at the wheel of the Darien and Meadows dragster, as successor to such current pro stars as Melanie Troxel, Brandon Bernstein and Morgan
Lucas, she became just the third woman in history to win the Mac Tools U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis, Ind., the sport's oldest, largest and most prestigious single event.
She went on to win two more national races and, at the season-ending Auto Club Finals at Pomona, Calif., shared the winners' circle with her dad in becoming the first father-and-daughter winners of the same event in NHRA history. She capped the season by being named both Rookie of the Year and Driver of the Year in an NHRA region encompassing Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Despite her success, Ashley never seriously considered a career in the "family business" until her father sent her to Frank Hawley's Drag Racing School as a 16th birthday present. That led her to take auto shop and welding courses as part of her elective curriculum at Esperanza High School in Yorba Linda, Calif.
Even though she began racing upon her high school graduation, her mother insisted that before she embarked on a full-time career, she had to earn her college degree. As a result, she spent her weekends racing and her weekdays in school, ultimately graduating in 3½ years with a degree in communications.
Ashley suspect things were going to be interesting the first time she expressed a genuine interest in pursuing a driving career.
"Dad said as soon as I got my car, I needed to start sleeping in it," she recalled, "because I guess that's what he did when he started out. He said I should walk around with my helmet on - like people wouldn't think that was weird."
If her choice of elective courses wasn't sufficient indication to her father that she might one day want to become involved in the family business, then certainly her fourth place finish in national points as a Top Alcohol rookie convinced him.
Force could not be more proud, nor more surprised.
"I'm a typical father who always wanted his son to grow up and drive his race car," said the 13-time Auto Racing All-America selection, "but I don't have any sons, so I always hoped one of my girls would have an interest. Ashley took auto mechanics in high school and I never even did that. It's great having her on tour with me."
As for hobbies, Ashley admits she's a movie fanatic, just like her dad.
"I go (to the movie theater) at least once a week," she said. "Sometimes he goes a couple times a day. I went with him once and he went to the first half of the movie. Then he got up and left because he told me he had already seen the last half. I think he went to see the end of something else."
Nevertheless, she has taken her love for the cinema a step further. She not only likes to watch movies, she has demonstrated a talent for producing them. Each year for the company Christmas party, she produces a movie that spoofs events and individuals in the sport, herself included.
Last year's movie was a parody of "A Christmas Carol" starring the elder Force as Scrooge and crew members and staff as the three ghosts of Christmas and other characters. It's title, "The Bi-Polar Express," was a not-so-veiled reference to her father's well-documented mood swings.
One thing is certain, whether she's making movies or starring in them, Ashley has her father's full attention and there's absolutely no chance he'll be sneaking out of this performance before it's over.
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