Golf Club Information
Ping's G20
Ping's G20 driver made its public debut last week at the PGA Tour's FedEx St. Jude Classic. (The club will be available at retail in mid-August.) Three pros—defending champ Lee Westwood, Kirk Triplett and D.J. Brigman—added it to their arsenal for Thursday's first round. Expect to see more G20 drivers on Tour throughout the summer.
The company's "game-improvement" drivers are almost always among the highest-rated sticks in Golf Magazine's annual "ClubTest" program because of their ability to blend forgiveness and power. Ping's tried-and-true design checklist includes optimizing center-of-gravity location; aerodynamics; feel; clubface size; structure (how it interacts on shots around the face); and clubhead inertia (stability) on off-center hits (high/low or heel/toe).
The G20 driver has a heavier head than G15 (7 grams more than standard) for greater force at impact. Additional backweighting and a more elongated face shore up misses. (Ping "shaved" the head in the low toe area to meet the 460cc size limit.) The reconfigured clubhead — 5 percent higher moment of inertia on heel or toe hits — combines with a light, 45.75-inch "high-balance point" shaft (TFC 169D or TFC 169D Tour) to boost clubhead speed and, thus, distance. Specifically, the TFC 169D shaft has more flexible tip and butt sections for softer feel.
In total, G20 launches shots 0.75 degrees higher than G15, with 200 rpm less spin and 1 mph faster ball speed on center hits, which adds up to five yards more carry and roll.
Cobra-Puma
Rickie Fowler's influence on Cobra-Puma Golf is undeniable. While rumors swirl that Fowler is joining Cobra's Tour staff, nothing official has been released yet. However, Puma's apparel line is already awash with Fowler's favorite colors, and now even the accent colors on Cobra's latest clubs are getting the Rickie treatment.
But if you look past the orange highlights on the new AMP (Advanced Material Placement) driver, you'll see an innovative approach to customization. Instead of an adjustable weight system, Cobra has manufactured the drivers with the weight and center of gravity in different locations for each loft.
910 D2
With the launch of its 910 D2 and 910 D3 drivers, Titleist brings the Tour van experience to your fingertips. Now you can set loft and lie angle independently of one another, thanks to the versatile SureFit Tour (SFT) hosel with patented "dual angle" technology. Its two-axis system enables you to dial in proper launch, spin and direction. Some other adjustable drivers provide excellent directional correction (right or left) through face-angle adjustment but seem to have less effect on launch angle (trajectory) optimization.
There are 16 loft/lie combinations using the SFT hosel. Titleist's robotic testing shows that differences in loft (1.5 degrees more loft than standard to 0.75 degrees less loft) result in an 825 rpm change in backspin and a 1.5-degree variation in launch angle. Tweaking lie angle (between 1.5 degrees upright to 0.75 degrees flat) produces six yards of dispersion change. These are serious numbers when you're trying to optimize ball flight.
That's not all. The "variable" face insert has a larger maximum ball-speed area than the corresponding 909 driver (15% bigger in 910 D2; 10% bigger in 910 D3). In addition, several factors contribute to enhanced stability, including a 17 percent thinner crown (lowers the club's center of gravity); a more sloped rear crown profile (moves CG lower and deeper); and a new swingweight screw location (more rearward than in prior models).
Titleist
What sets the new drivers apart from previous Titleist models is the Sure Fit Tour adjustment system. Using a torque wrench that comes with each club, golfers can set the clubhead into one of 16 different playing positions to customize face angle, lie angle and the playing loft.
The standard face-angle setting for the drivers is .5° open, but it can be made up to 1.5° open or 1.5° closed. As you adjust the clubface left or right, the effective loft changes within a 2.25° range.
According to Stephanie Bezilla, Titleist's metal woods development manager, the adjustable-head system is a natural advancement of Titleist's Sure Fit system that has been in place to expedite the custom-fitting process
TaylorMade's 2012 wood
Mike Ferris, TaylorMade's vice president of product marketing, was counting each stride as he marched across the front of the conference room. "Twelve, thirteen, fourteen," he said before touching the wall, turning around and pacing back again. "Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen."
P.T. Barnum would have loved the way Ferris had just shown how much longer TaylorMade claims the new RocketBallz 3-wood is than last season's Burner SuperFast 2.0.
This is the club that gave the RocketBallz family its name. According to TaylorMade, the engineers who developed the club—and a small number of Tour pros who were given a chance to hit the earliest prototypes—all said that the 3-wood "hit the ball like a rocket."
Having a little fun, the engineers etched "RocketBallz" into subsequent refinements of the prototype, more as a code name than anything else. They never expected the name to stick, but it did, although it was shortened to RBZ on the sole.
Once you get past the name, the first thing you'll notice about the RocketBallz fairway woods is a cavity carved in the sole. Positioned just behind the face, it is designed to increase the flexibility of both the face and the sole of the club to help increase ball speed.
Golfers will notice a weight plug positioned directly behind the cavity. In drivers, weights like this one are often positioned in the back to move the center of gravity lower and farther from the face to encourage a higher ball flight. In the RBZ fairways, TaylorMade has moved the center of gravity in these clubs forward.
"Historically, we've always said, let's move the center of gravity back to make the club easier to play" says Tom Olsavsky, TaylorMade's senior direct of product creation. However, Olsavsky notes, most golfers hit their fairway woods and hybrids high in the face. He says the physics that helps you hit longer shots with your 460-cc driver doesn't help you as much with fairway woods because they feature a smaller head and shallower face. In order to get a higher launch angle, more ball speed and more carry distance, TaylorMade says that it moved the center of gravity in to keep it more aligned with where golfers actually hit the ball.
Olsavsky says the combination of the cavity and the forward adjustment of the center of gravity increased the RocketBallz ball speed by 3-4 mph over the Burner SuperFast 2.0.
"We have never seen a fairway wood that has gone right up to the USGA speed limit," Olsavsky says. "We had some things made from titanium that got close, but no one wanted to pay for them, so we're excited to be able to produce a product in a steel construction that goes right up to the USGA limits for coefficient of restitution [COR] and CT [the face's trampoline effect]."
Like the rest of TaylorMade's 2012 wood and rescue offerings, the RocketBallz line features a white matte finish on the crown and a black face to aid in alignment. But unlike the R11 clubs, the RBZ models are not adjustable—TaylorMade hasn't been able to incorporate moveable weights into a head that features a channel on the sole. (At least not yet.)
The fairway woods will be available in both standard and Tour models. The Tour version has a slightly smaller head, a more open face angle and a fade bias. Similarly, TaylorMade will offer a standard RBZ Rescue club and a Tour Rescue.
When they arrive in pro shops on Feb. 3, the RocketBallz fairway woods will come standard with a Matrix Ozik XCon 5 50-gram shaft; the Tour version will come with a Matrix Ozik RUL 70 75-gram graphite shaft. Each will cost $229 and lofts will range from 13°-24°. RocketBallz TP fairway woods with upgraded shafts will cost $329
