The electrohydraulic servo position control system (HPC) is the core of an auto gap control for a modern fourhigh continuous hot strip mill. The actuators are loaded with considerable external disturbances, rolling forces, and the system stiffness and position accuracy will become hypersensitive to the leakage and the compressibility of the oil. Many efforts have being made to increase the position accuracies. The conventional resources are proportion integral differential (PID) controller. But the PID controller is faint for a considerable external disturbance. In this paper, by introducing the adaptive control strategy of model reference the reciprocities of the system structure with the loads were analyzed. With the Lyapunov energy function, an adaptive control algorithm applied to improve the system accuracy was formulated. The system simulations and the selection of parameters of the model were also discussed. The simulations show the static state errors at 0.02%. Finally, the industrial experimental result was given.