Fact is, a metalwood’s shelf life is a lot shorter if you’re a tour pro like Fox, who ranks among the top 20 percent on tour in driver ball speed at 180 miles per hour.
The Titleist GTS fairway woods feature more composite than in past models with the lightweight piece wrapping around the crown to the sole. The saved weight allows for adjustable heel and toe sole weights, two different shapes and face heights and deeper centres of gravity and higher launch compared to previous models.
We ran Ping’s most recent fairway woods, hybrids, utility iron and long iron on a swing robot at two different swing speeds and attack angles to determine how much head delivery at impact affects launch, spin and carry.
Callaway’s Quantum fairway woods are built to protect performance on imperfect strikes, particularly low-face contact, while the Quantum hybrids are designed as true long-iron replacements.
Cobra’s OPTM fairway woods and hybrids are engineered around optimised Products of Inertia (POI), a design philosophy focused on delivering greater stability, forgiveness and consistency through precise mass distribution.
The Ping G440 fairway woods and hybrids both utilise a new internal hosel structure that frees room for the face to deflect while saving mass that can be used to lower the centre of gravity for easier, more spin-efficient launch.
The Callaway Elyte drivers look to maximise distance by combining the most productive aspects of a forgiving, lower spin head design with an aerodynamically sleek shape – two design paradigms that typically work at cross purposes.
Some people can absolutely smoke a 3-wood, so we are in no way saying no one should be using them. But if you fall into that camp, you are a statistical anomaly.
A healthy percentage of average golfers are playing too little loft on their lowest-lofted fairway wood, and our Hot List testing reveals that more loft is going to be a better choice more often for as many as a third of all golfers.
Australian Golf Digest
