Why some pros are opting for drivers designed for the masses 

Not long ago, the best players in the world preferred the least-forgiving drivers with the lowest launch angle and the least amount of spin with no built-in draw bias. Then the two best players on the planet, Scottie Scheffler and Nelly Korda, showed that it is possible to play world-class golf using a driver designed for everyday players (Scheffler’s TaylorMade Qi10) with maximum forgiveness (Korda’s Qi10 Max). Fellow TaylorMade staffer Rory McIlroy, who ranked fourth on the 2024 PGA Tour in Total Driving, also uses the standard Qi10 model as opposed to the compact, low-spinning Qi10 LS. 

Dig deeper into the driver usage on the professional tours and you find that models designed for maximum forgiveness are becoming increasingly popular. Akshay Bhatia and Alex Noren have used the Callaway Paradym Ai Smoke Max D (draw). Cameron Champ has played Ping’s very forgiving G430 Max 10K. Chandler Phillips even uses a Ping G430 LST that features a stock build, including the standard 55-gram shaft you might find on a floor model at Golf Galaxy. 

With the widespread use of weight-saving carbon composite in the body of new drivers, the centre of gravity isn’t drifting back and higher as much as it used to, and that results in forgiveness with low spin. Scheffler, for example, played a more forgiving driver this year than he did two years ago, and his average spin rate has barely changed. 

Although these forgiveness-focused drivers are not the standard on tour, their presence in the bags of some of the game’s best players suggests that there is no right driver for a certain skill level. No handicap level or swing speed eliminates considering almost any kind of driver. With dozens of models and multiple choices within the same brand, one of the things we stress during our Golf Digest Hot List player testing every year is this: throw away your assumptions. Be prepared to be surprised. 

When we looked at how our high-swing-speed, low-handicap players at the Hot List fared with game-improvement drivers, we found some did well and others didn’t. For example, Josh Macera, a 1-handicapper with a swing speed of 119 miles per hour, averaged four more metres with the game-improvement drivers compared to all others. Jack Bingham, another 1-handicapper who plays a natural fade and swings at 110 miles per hour, enjoyed more ball speed with the high-forgiveness drivers, including 11 more metres on average with the draw-biased Ping G430 SFT. Conversely, Wesley Gilmore, a plus-1 marker, hit the forgiving drivers almost nine metres shorter with a spin rate on one model that was more than 30 percent higher than his average across all drivers. 

This tells us that the driver has become as individualised as the putter. Each player’s swing is going to find a driver with a particular shape and centre of gravity that makes his or her delivery more efficient, leading to a more explosive ball flight. This is what is called optimising performance. You cannot find the right driver by guessing or assuming that what has always been your go-to isn’t going to change. 

Korda has used TaylorMade’s Qi10 Max driver since the start of the year when she won the LPGA Drive-On Championship in January. That driver has a total forgiveness, or moment of inertia, of more than 10,000, a measurement of stability in how much the head twists vertically or horizontally on a mis-hit. Less twisting means more energy is transferred to the ball at impact. For perspective, according to TaylorMade, a 10,000 total MOI is about 40 percent higher than what TaylorMade drivers were a decade ago. 

“I look down and know I can hit any shot I want with it,” Korda says. For much of her career, though, she’s played drivers with a little bit of a draw bias like TaylorMade’s Stealth 2 HD or Titleist’s TSR1. It’s all about matching her with her desired shape (more clubhead volume toward the heel side) and her desired right-to-left ball flight, said TaylorMade’s Ryan Ressa, senior tour manager. “People perceive that it’s kind of an anti-slice club, but it’s, really not,” he says.  

Ressa says that Korda wants to see the ball on a tee shot fall from right to left, maybe a five-metre draw. “That’s just the shot shape she prefers, so it’s hard, even if you find something that goes dead straight, it just doesn’t fit her eye,” he says.  

Aside from her custom shaft (Mitsubishi Diamana GT 60) and custom length (45.18 inches), Korda’s Qi10 Max is only slightly tweaked from the stock version. The rear perimeter weight is about six grams lighter than standard, which makes the driver’s overall MOI slightly less than 10,000, and the TPS sole weight is a little heavier to get the total weight of the head back to standard and give Korda a little more draw. 

It’s worth remembering again, however, that the measurement of a higher MOI that records a higher number is not necessarily the be-all and end-all for forgiveness. According to Chuck Golden, vice-president of research and development for Titleist: “The first thing that people kind of forget about but need to realise is that MOI is not about distance gain; it’s about mitigating distance loss on off-centre hits. MOI does not guarantee a straight shot, and it does not make shots straighter, and it does not improve the spin and launch consistency across the face. Spin and launch consistency across the face are functions of the face material that you’re using, where your centre of gravity is located, how you’ve engineered the curvature of the face, and MOI. It’s all those things working in concert with one another, not to mention, how the player delivers the club to the ball.”  

More importantly, perhaps, MOI is already pretty impressive with 95 percent of current driver designs, compared to what was available a decade ago. More MOI is always going to be better for your mis-hits and, as we’ve heard, probably your confidence, too. Golden makes the case for how years of Titleist research shows that even for the average golfer more than 70 percent of impacts occur within 1.25 centimetres of centre. That’s much tighter than the kind of miss where an ultra-high MOI driver might help you more than a standard high MOI driver. In other words, these ultra-high MOI drivers are helping your absolute worst hits get somewhat better. You just might not hit it there all that often, even less so with a driver that has been custom-fit to you.  

A driver fitting can produce a lot of numbers on a launch-monitor screen, but one worth paying attention to is how often you are consistently delivering the clubhead square at impact. Obviously, that will show up in longer distance and tighter ball-flight dispersion, but it should also speak to how easy it is for you to make the same swing, the way Korda has been doing since the start of the year. 

Chris Marchini, director of golf experience for Golf Galaxy and Dick’s Sporting Goods and the lead clubfitter at the Golf Digest Hot List summit, recently put it this way: “My advice is to go into a fitting totally agnostic. We see it at the Hot List Summit every year. We’re putting a club in someone’s hands that is far better optimised than what this player’s handicap, swing speed or skill level might suggest, but it ends up producing the best ball flight for them.” 

In other words, be open to possibilities. It has certainly worked for the two best players in the world. 

Feature image: andy lyons/getty images