Driver Economics 101
Part 2

Technology: What is real and what is hype?

By Steve Divnick,
President of Divnick Golf

I wrote the parody about the 375-yard Sonic Launcher™ to illustrate two very important points about driver technology:

1) The game of golf has rules and limits which are critical to maintain the essence of the game.
2) If equipment was more important than skill, you could buy a desired outcome, and so could everyone else.

Having said that, we could easily design a device that would launch EVERY drive well over 400 yards and straight down the middle every time. But alas, a device that you aim from your shoulder or that has some other form of mechanical, electrical, or explosive propulsion would not be golf.

The Rules of Golf have a critical purpose: To make sure that the skill of the player is the most important variable.

Driver Economics 101, Part One concluded that the major brand manufacturers devote the majority of their engineering budgets to designing clubs for tour pros, and then pour millions of dollars more into paying endorsements to those same pros hoping it will convince us to buy those new sticks. The escalating costs and build-up of unused drivers in garages across the land are fast-approaching a critical mass of self-implosion.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are nothing like tour players such as Tiger Woods, Vijay Sing, Phil Mickelson, or Ernie Els. We don’t have their swings. We don’t practice like they do. We don’t have their coaches. So we need our own tools, designed for average players like us, with imperfect swings.

While ball and shaft technology contribute to the significant increases in distance over the past few years, this article will focus only on driver heads. A discussion of balls and shafts will be covered in future articles.

The element in new head technology that has increased distance the most is the material. In a relatively short span of time, heads have gone from wood, to stainless steel, to titanium. Compared to wood and stainless steel, titanium drivers generate a much greater Coefficient of Restitution (COR), more commonly known as “spring-effect.”

Because titanium is lighter and stronger than stainless steel, it has allowed for the following changes in design:

  • Thinner faces with greater COR
  • Larger heads which provide a bigger sweet spot on mishits
  • The ability to place more weight around the perimeter for additional forgiveness

The newfound distance prompted the USGA to limit the COR in 1998 to .830. The R&A agreed to those limits in 2002. To put that number in perspective, if you dropped a ball with a COR of 1 from 10 feet onto a surface with a COR of 1, it would bounce back up a full 10 feet, and continue to bounce up and down forever. That would be “perpetual motion.” I own a few patents, but none on perpetual motion, although that sure would be great. Perpetual motion would solve the world’s energy and pollution problems, and eliminate fossil fuels and dependence on foreign oil. Every home would generate its own energy, and every car would run on its own perpetual motion power source. Cell phones and computers wouldn’t need batteries or cords.

Back to reality...

While a COR of 1 is not possible, it is fairly easy to get more than .830, especially with super-size heads that resemble a VW on a stick!

So when you read advertisements that claim to provide maximum COR, that’s no big deal. Virtually all modern heads produce .830 COR. In fact, the current challenge is to produce the maximum without exceeding the COR limit which is the most-cited reason drivers do not conform.

Therefore, modern driver head technology, in terms of creating ball speed off the face, has reached its practical and legal limits. Whether a manufacturer reaches the maximum COR with exotic metal, sound waves, or the next trademarked g-whiz claim, it will not produce any significant differences in ball speed off the face, unless it violates the limits imposed by the USGA. Hence, any advertisement claiming more distance because of material advancements that produce greater COR, more bounce, increased spring effect, or any similar element can safely be viewed as hype.

The Last Frontier

So what is the remaining frontier of driver performance? It is in designing a head to produce optimum trajectory and spin-rates, and matching that to the player’s swing. While it can be argued that average players can improve their swing the most with lessons and supervised practice, most of us either can’t afford that, or we are not committed to it. Beyond that, as we age, we become less flexible and our muscles don’t fire as fast. As our swing slows down, it is all the more important to have higher loft, lower back-spin, and greater shaft flex. This has been documented by our own testing, and also covered in Golf Digest, November of 2003.

So the most effective way for the average golfer to achieve maximum distance and accuracy is to use a modern titanium driver, and find the loft and flex that matches his or her swing to produce an optimum arc and roll-out.

If you see an advertisement for a driver that claims to have a low CG, know that it will produce MORE back-spin and make the ball climb like an inverted banana, then drop and stop. The driver is the only club in your bag that you want to REDUCE spin. Our research demonstrates that a higher CG is the best way for average players to accomplish that...without changing their swing. Fortunately, it is legal to place the ball on a little stick a couple of inches off the ground when you are teeing off. That allows us to design big tall heads with a high CG.

As a bonus of higher loft, when you look down at the head and can actually see the face, it creates confidence that you will easily hit the ball in the air. So you no longer try to “lift” the ball off the tee with your swing, which causes all kinds of bad results. Armed with new-found confidence, you relax and swing with better tempo. That usually adds another 10 or 15 yards no matter what club you are swinging. But that confidence and tempo isn’t going to happen with a low-lofted club that was designed for a pro with a perfect swing.

In summary, modern titanium technology is easily producing the maximum-allowable Coefficient of Restitution. Advertisements claiming to have a unique way of producing spring effect is probably hype. The most important thing for average players is to find a driver that produces a high arc with minimum back-spin and maximum roll-out.

Part 3 will discuss the shaft and how a person with a slower swing can hit farther than a person with a fast swing...if they understand and employ a little-used secret.

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