What an extra 10 mph actually does

Golf Digest

You've probably wondered what separates a 95 mph golfer from a 105 mph golfer. Does extra speed fix everything? Help you bomb it like the pros? Shed strokes off your handicap? The honest answer: It's really complicated.

We've been running our robotic testing with Golf Laboratories at 95 mph for years, which is an average swing speed for a male amateur. But we expanded this cycle to include 105 mph testing, so we could see how performance changes when you add speed.

Titleist's GTS lineup gave us the perfect case study.

Here's the thing though: not every metric moves the same way when you add speed. Carry distance is straightforward. But spin, face consistency and dispersion all do their own thing depending on which loft and model you're looking at. It's messier than the data sheet would suggest.

The data graphics in my latest analysis piece break down every GTS build at both speeds. See how your speed actually translates.

What an extra 10 mph actually buys you: Titleist GTS drivers

We tested Titleist’s GTS drivers at 95 and 105 mph. Here's what changed

By Jonathan Wall

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Jonathan Wall

Callaway's Full Toe SP wedge is built around a simple observation: open-face wedge shots aren't centered strikes. Contact drifts high and toward the toe, and on a conventional wedge profile, that's right about where the grooves stop.

So Callaway extended them with the help of Spin Gen 2.0 grooves that run heel to toe across the face, with the pitch spacing tightened by 17 degrees, which the company says amounts to 44 percent more groove area than a conventionally shaped wedge.

The elongated toe also created room to move mass. Callaway's Spin Pocket construction (the largest pocket the company has built, 18 percent bigger than Opus SP+) pulls material out of the bottom of the head and relocates it up the face, producing the highest wedge center of gravity (CG) in Callaway's history. Square the face and the CG sits above the strike, holding launch down and spin up. Open it, and contact climbs closer to the center of mass while the head's offset adds launch back.

Jonathan Wall

Scottie Scheffler showed up at last week's FedEx St. Jude Championship with a TaylorMade Qi4D driver, never said a word about it and picked up 13 yards. Is the distance bump an aberration, or a warning for the competition? To quantify the differences between Qi4D and Qi10 (Scheffler's previous driver), we put both drivers on the swing robot and found that distance increased and dispersion improved as speed ramped up with Qi4D.

More than any other driver we’ve tested on the robot in the last 7 years, Qi4D rewards players who can move it—just like Scottie. Check out the full video breakdown.

Jonathan Wall

Every so often, an equipment pitch lands in my DMs that actually stops me cold. This one certainly did. Coleman Rollins had a month of PTO to burn last December, no golf to play and a growing frustration with launch monitors that either cost more than a car or flat-out estimated the numbers. So he bought a Doppler radar and a Raspberry Pi and started building his own. The result is Open Flight—an open-source launch monitor anyone can build at home, with software that's getting sharpened by everyday golfers who happen to know their way around code.

His pitch to the rest of us? "It's 500 bucks compared to $30,000."

Ball and club speed are dialed. Launch angles are inside half a degree. And the spin rates? Coming along.

Coleman joins the latest Club Lab podcast to share his origin story. Give it a listen.