Wilson

The company that brought us the “Driver vs Driver” reality TV show for amateur club designers has a little secret. Your clay models and napkin drawings and erector-set projects? They are nice, but if you want to really design a better driver, you need to think faster than any human possibly could, especially when you are trying to maximise ball speed across the face. The multiple-thickness-face design on the D9 was driven by artificial-intelligence algorithms that churned out more than 500 versions at a clip in search of the optimum pattern. Wilson’s process yielded a new face shape in which ball speed is faster not only for the best strikes but for the off-centre hits, too. This performance improvement is good science, but the D9 works because it helps better players and slower swings alike. One design key is a weight-saving carbon-composite crown that helps lower the centre of gravity while improving sound. The other difference-maker is a setup that converts the standard model to a 40-gram lighter version with a head that looks the same.

LOFTS 9, 10.5, 13; non-adjustable