Even so, the 26-year-old daughter of drag racing icon John Force remains on pace to reclaim for her dad and his team the NHRA Funny Car Championship that has been theirs for most of the last two decades.

With semifinal finishes in each of the Countdown's first three races, Force Hood returns to Virginia Motorsports Park, site of this week's fourth and final Virginia Nationals, as the Funny Car points leader.

The margin isn't significant three points over teammate and brother-in-law Robert Hight; 26 over regular season champ Tony Pedregon - but the position is.

Before Force Hood sped onto the scene in 2007 as the first woman in seven years to compete in the Funny Car division, it was unfathomable to think that a woman realistically could compete for a season championship at the wheel of a short wheelbase, 8,000 horsepower beast of a race car like the Castrol Ford.

Conventional wisdom suggested that women simply didn't possess the physical strength needed to ride herd on one of the most powerful cars on earth. Yeah, right.

Not only did the graduate of Cal State-Fullerton prove that women could win on drag racing's biggest stage, she proved they could do so with regularity. Now she's tantalizingly close to becoming the first woman in the 40-year history of the Funny Car class to win the championship.

In a sport in which a woman never before had reached the final round of a Funny Car race, Ashley began busting down barriers when she won the Auto Club's 2007 Road to the Future Award as the NHRA tour's Rookie-of-the-Year.

In her first season, she became the first woman to make it to the finals, the first to finish in the Top 10 and the first to smack the wall at more than 200 miles an hour.

In her second year, she became the first to win a race and the first to lead the points. This year, after setting the national Funny Car speed record (312.13 miles per hour) becoming the first woman to win the Mac Tools U.S. Nationals in two different classes (Funny Car and Top Fuel), she has set herself up to become just the second woman after Shirley Muldowney to win a world championship in one of the two featured categories.

She believes she and her Castrol GTX team have an excellent shot at the title. Few would beg to differ especially since the implementation of new qualifying bonus rules that reward the top three performers in each session with three points for quick time, two for second quickest and one for third quickest. Ashley has earned more bonus points than any other Funny Car driver in the first three Countdown races (14).

"I have a great team," Ashley said, "and two great crew chiefs in Dean Antonelli and Ron Douglas. They're the real reason we're in this position. I'm still learning but they still give me a great car every round.

"I love being a driver," she said, "but I'm jealous of the fans getting to watch all this go down because it's going to be exciting."

Off the Track:
- Ashley was among a group of drivers and NHRA sponsors who participated in the Opening Bell ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange on June 10. She was joined by BP/Castrol executive Marci Brand, Regional Vice-President, Automotive Americas, among others.
- Ashley and her cat, Simba, will be featured in a soon-to-be released coffee table book on athletes and their pets created by award-winning photographer David Woo.

Did You Know?
- Ashley is one of only two Funny Car drivers, along with brother-in-law Robert Hight, to have led the Funny Car points each of the last two years.
- Ashley was named 2008 Female Athlete of the Year by the Los Angeles-based Jim Murray Memorial Foundation.
- Ashley's Castrol GTX Mustang was the fastest Funny Car at the 1,000 foot distance in 2008 (310.05 mph) and is the fastest again this year at 312.13 mph, a speed NHRA now recognizes as the official national record at 1,000 feet.

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Courtesy of Dave Densmore