Adria (Force) Hight, the eldest daughter of 16-time NHRA Funny Car World Champion John Force and the former Chief Financial Officer of John Force Racing, died peacefully on Tuesday April 28, 2026, in Indianapolis, Indiana, surrounded by her family.
She was 56. No cause of death has been disclosed.
Private services will be held in accordance with her wishes, with burial at Roselawn Memorial Park in Terre Haute, Indiana.
A celebration of her life is planned for later in the year in California.
John Force Racing issued a statement:
“It is with heavy hearts that we share the passing of Adria (Force) Hight, the oldest daughter of John Force. After graduating from Huntington Beach High School, Adria joined the family drag racing business, becoming one of the first employees of John Force Racing.”
Motorsports journalist Aaron England, who first shared the news publicly on X, described her contribution in terms the organization itself would recognize. “While much of her work happened behind the scenes, she was there from the very beginning of JFR, helping build it from the ground up.”
Who Was Adria Hight?
Adria Force Hight was born on June 4, 1969, in Huntington Park, California, the only child from John Force’s first marriage, to the woman now known as Lana Starks.
She grew up along the California coast, a childhood the obituary describes in warm and ordinary terms, skating, swimming, collecting matchbox cars, playing restaurant with her siblings.
Huntington Beach was home. The noise of drag racing was always somewhere in the background.
After graduating from Huntington Beach High School, Adria did not go far. She joined the family business, what would become John Force Racing, as one of its very first employees.
The team was not yet a powerhouse. It was a family operation finding its footing in one of the most expensive and unforgiving motorsports in the world.
The early days looked nothing like the operation it would eventually become, and Adria’s entry-level tasks reflected that, answering phones, selling T-shirts out of the race trailer at events, doing whatever needed doing to keep the machine moving.
That is where her story in racing begins. What followed across three decades was the transformation of a scrappy racing family into one of the most successful organizations in motorsports history, and Adria was inside that transformation the entire time.
She eventually rose to serve as CFO, Chief Financial Officer, of John Force Racing.
The woman who started by selling merchandise out of a trailer ended up managing the finances of a multi-championship NHRA team that her father built and that she helped make sustainable.
The obituary credits her with helping build the team into the powerhouse it is today.
That is not a small thing. John Force’s talent and personality created the brand. Adria’s work behind the scenes helped create the infrastructure that allowed the brand to last.
The Force Family And What Drag Racing Did For Them
John Force is the greatest drag racer in the history of the NHRA. He has won 16 Funny Car World Championships, a number that is not just the most in Funny Car history but the most for any driver in the sport’s most competitive class.
His career spans more than five decades of professional drag racing. He is the sport’s most recognizable figure and the foundation around which one of motorsports’ most famous family stories has been built.
But Force has also been honest about the cost of that career on his role as a father.
In a 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said:
“I failed as a father, miserably. But drag racing, NHRA, brought them all home to me. Brought us back together because it brought them racing.”
That reunion played out in a specific way with each of his daughters. Ashley Force Hood became an NHRA Funny Car driver, the first daughter to drive professionally for the team.
Brittany Force became one of the most successful Top Fuel drivers in the sport, winning multiple championships and driving for the family team.
Courtney Force drove Funny Car professionally before retiring to raise a family with IndyCar driver Graham Rahal. Each came to the sport through their father. Each built a career in it.
Adria came differently. She was not a driver. She was the one who made it possible for the operation to function, the eldest sister who stayed behind the administrative curtain while her younger siblings took center stage at the track.
She traveled the country to be at races not as a competitor but as a family member and a professional, watching her sisters run, watching her former husband Robert Hight win championships, watching her daughter Autumn race junior dragsters and cheering louder than anyone else in the stands.
Robert Hight And Autumn
Adria was previously married to Robert Hight, one of the most accomplished Funny Car drivers in NHRA history and the current president of John Force Racing.
Hight has won multiple Funny Car championships driving for the team that Adria helped build.
The family and professional connections between Adria and Robert are layered in the way that only a sport run by families can produce, she was the daughter of the man he drives for, the CFO of the team he races with, and the mother of the daughter they share.
Their daughter, Autumn Hight, grew up in the same racing world that defined her parents and her grandparents.
The obituary describes Adria’s relationship with Autumn with characteristic simplicity. Adria loved being her mother, they traveled the country together going to NHRA events, and when Autumn started racing junior dragsters, Adria was her biggest fan.
Autumn is engaged to Nathan Prose with plans to marry later in 2026. She had not yet posted publicly about her mother’s death as of the time of writing.
In recent years, Adria and her fiancé Jimmy Collins had moved to Indiana specifically to be closer to Autumn.
She had stepped back from the highest-profile demands of her career to embrace a quieter life, caring for her pets, traveling to races, spending time with the people she loved. She was surrounded by her family when she died.
What She Leaves Behind
The NHRA community does not produce many household names from its front offices.
The drivers get the fame, the reaction times, the burnouts, the elapsed times in the three-second range, the explosions that send cars into the barriers at 300 miles per hour.
The people who make the organizations run, the CFOs and operations directors and logistics coordinators, are largely invisible to the audiences who come to the track.
Adria Hight was one of those people. She chose to be one of those people.
The obituary does not frame that choice as a sacrifice. It frames it as a calling, something she was good at, something she committed to, something she built over three decades until the team her father founded was worthy of the dynasty word.
She is survived by her daughter Autumn, her parents John Force and Lana Starks, her fiancé Jimmy Collins, her siblings Ashley, Brittany and Courtney, and their children, Jacob, Noah, Brody, Harlan, Tinley and Fallon, the nieces and nephews who the obituary notes “adored their silly aunt.”
She was 56 years old. Private services will be held.
The celebration of her life will come later, in California, where she grew up collecting matchbox cars and learning what it meant to be a Force.
MY God Bless your family.