Had another fitting today, after the success of the fairway/utility fitting it got me thinking about my driver setup, I have never been fitted for a driver, always buying used or hand me down stuff from my brother. I bought a Callaway Elyte off him for silly money month and a half ago and it's been OK, not the longest driver I have used and according to ShotScope, I hit 20% fairways with it and miss left nearly 40% of the time. Recently I have been hitting the BRNR Mini driver longer and more accurately with 39% fairways hit and an average distance only about 8 yards shorter, which is a nice trade off for accuracy, I turned it down to 11.5 degrees to achieve this. I know this is more me lacking in confidence with my driver rather than being a demon with the Mini Driver.
After the fitting, I feel the 3 wood will effectively take the BRNR out of play, I can't hit the BRNR off the deck (despite everyone saying it's easy to do, the face is so deep and I hit low on the face usually so it doesn't work) and the GT2 3 wood should carry similar fairway finding distances, whilst also being much more playable from the turf for longer shots.
So it was decided, driver fitting, booked the same guy I had for my fairway fit as he was very good and has a good idea of my tendencies after the fitting last time. Spoiler, the result isn't what I was expecting.
Kicked off hitting my Elyte, did have to explain why I'm doing the fitting as he thought it odd I wanted to get fitted despite having a relatively new driver in the bag. Fortunately, I hit my usual array of shots, mostly left, some right, very high. He also noted it was spinning a lot which was making the height and side misses worse. It is nice when you hit in a fitting as you would on course, so he could clearly see my issues. Onto the testing;
Driver 1 - TaylorMade QI35. So we jumped into the QI35 first, he cited it's good performance low on the face thanks to TM's speed pocket and high MOI design. We went with a Mitsubishi Kai'Li blue X flex shaft. It felt good, straight away I liked the feel more than the Elyte despite not really being sold on the carbon face, dispersion was dramatically improved over the Elyte, distance was about the same and every now and then it would spin up a lot. Felt good though, so we kept that one out. Incidentally I had skipped trying the QI35 fairways having tried them before the previous fitting and not liking them.
Driver 2 - Srixon ZXi. Surprise number 1. Never hit a Srixon driver before, and wow this surprised me, the performance was fantastic, it was longer than the QI35 and Elyte by about 10 yards in carry, spin came down to where he wanted to see it, dispersion tightened up nicely as well. My criticism was sound and feel, whilst the performance was good, the feel was quite harsh and the sound was incredibly loud and tinny, first shot actually made my left ear ring a little. Interesting shaft as well, it was a Miyazaki, can't remember the model, but it did feel nice to swing, swing weight felt spot on. A good sign for me when swinging a club is if I can start getting after it, feel confident enough to start going for the swings a bit more, this club did that.
Driver 3 - Titleist GT3. This is what I expected to perform well with, having been fitted for Titleist wood/utility, I had high expectations here and expected to leave ordering a Titleist. How wrong I was! Just didn't gel with it at all, struggled with impact, feel was OK off middle but poor when not, felt difficult to control. We used a X flex Tensei 1K Black, same as what my 3 wood was fitted for. It just didn't work for me, immediately discounted. We didn't bother with the GT2 as the spin would climb and he could tell it wouldn't offer enough to try it.
Driver 4 - Ping G440 LST. Yep, the low spin model, I didn't expect that. When he went to fit the head I assumed it would be the Max, as we had been hitting the core models so far. Clearly based on my tendencies and numbers though, he felt it would work. We went with the X flex Tensei 1K Black again, and oh BOY, did it perform. Long, accurate, felt incredible, looks great down behind the ball. Control through the swing felt really nice, overall swing weight felt great just like the Srixon. Smash factor was consistently between 1.42-1.48 which was superb, the Elyte was around 1.34.
So, Titleist and TaylorMade were out, which surprised me. What surprised me more was that the shortlist came down to Srixon and Ping! Went back to the Srixon, hit it well again, just the sound that I found to be horrible. Plus, when compared to the Ping, smash factor dropped, the dispersion was a bit wider and it wasn't quite as long. Finished up hitting shots with the G440 LST and it was just metronomic, even hit one off the end of the range, 295y total adjusted and arrow straight.
So, Ping G440 LST with the Mitsubishi Tensei 1K Black X Flex ordered.
as the course where I joined is pretty tough and all the scores so far for handicap have been right at the top of the 90's. That's fine as realistically that's where I'm at, at the moment.
