Force Hood grew up immersed in drag racing as the daughter of John Force and Laurie Force. She attended Esperanza High School in Anaheim, California, where she was a cheerleader, then earned a bachelor's degree in communications with a television and video emphasis from California State University, Fullerton, in 2003. Her two sisters, Courtney and Brittany, also pursued professional drag racing careers; she has an older half-sister, Adria.
The Force family gained wider public visibility through the A&E reality show Driving Force, which aired from July 2006 to May 2007 and followed John Force, Laurie Force, and their daughters Ashley, Brittany, and Courtney through their personal lives and racing careers.
Force Hood began competitive driving as a Top Alcohol Dragster racer. As a rookie in 2004, she won three of the season's final five events, including the 50th annual Mac Tools U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis and the season-ending Automobile Club of Southern California event at Pomona. That Pomona win placed her in the winners' circle alongside her father — the first father-daughter winning pair in a single NHRA event. She finished the year fourth in national points.
In 2007, she stepped up to the Professional ranks, driving a Castrol-sponsored Mustang Funny Car for John Force Racing. At an April 2007 event in Atlanta, she and her father became the first father and daughter to race each other in NHRA competition. She won the round with a 4.779-second pass at 317.05 mph and advanced to the semifinals, equaling the best Funny Car finish ever recorded by a female driver. In October 2007, at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, she became the first woman to compete in a national-series Top Fuel/Funny Car final round, losing on a holeshot to Tony Pedregon. The NHRA named her Rookie of the Year in the Funny Car division for 2007.
The 2008 season brought Force Hood's most significant results. She reached the final round in three consecutive events early in the year — Houston, Las Vegas, and Atlanta — losing the first two. At Las Vegas, she became the first female racer to lead the NHRA Funny Car point standings. On April 27, 2008, at the NHRA Summit Southern Nationals held at Atlanta Dragway in Commerce, Georgia, her opponent in the final was her own father, John Force, who was attempting to secure the 1,000th round win of his career. Force Hood won with a 4.837-second elapsed time, claiming her first professional victory and making history as the first woman to win an NHRA professional-category event in the Top Fuel or Funny Car class.
In 2009, she won the O'Reilly NHRA Spring Nationals on March 29, defeating Jack Beckman in the final. Later that season, at the U.S. Nationals, she beat teammate Robert Hight to become the first female Funny Car driver to win at Indianapolis and the first woman to win in two different drag racing classes. She finished the 2009 season second in Funny Car points, the highest year-end ranking achieved by a woman in the class.
In January 2011, Force Hood was named President of John Force Entertainment, a media subsidiary of John Force Racing. She simultaneously announced that she and her husband Daniel Hood — parts manager of the Castrol GTX Funny Car team, whom she married in Lake Tahoe on December 13, 2008 — were expecting their first child and that she would be on hiatus for the 2011 season. Their son, Jacob John Hood, was born on August 18, 2011.
Force Hood subsequently announced her retirement from competitive driving. In 2014, she completed a testing session at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in her sister Courtney's Funny Car to renew an expired NHRA Funny Car licence, keeping open the possibility of a test or reserve-driver role, but she did not return to competition.
Ashley Force Hood's 2008 victory at Atlanta broke a barrier that had stood across the entire history of NHRA Top Fuel and Funny Car competition. Combined with her 2009 win at Indianapolis, she remains the first and, at the time of her retirement, the only woman to have won professional-class events in two different NHRA categories. Her career unfolded within a family context that made John Force Racing a multi-generational story across both the sport and mainstream American television audiences.
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