WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: The Titleist GTS drivers (GTS2, GTS3, GTS4) each create fresh opportunities in forgiveness, low spin and fitting/adjustability, all made possible by a newly enlarged polymer-infused lightweight carbon shell that covers some 60 percent of the body’s surface area, the most composite material on a Titleist primary driver line in company history. The new construction frees up mass to create unique combinations of increased forgiveness with lowered spin. As has been the case in the past with their numerology, the GTS2 offers the widest footprint with a focus on forgiveness and new front and rear adjustability; the GTS3 uses a five-position weight track in the front of the sole and a newly lowered centre of gravity for less spin; and the GTS4 expands to a full 460 cubic centimetres for increased forgiveness to go along with its ultra-low spin focus.
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PRICE, OPTIONS & AVAILABILITY: $1,149 ($NZ1,269), with 16-way adjustable hosel. Lofts: 8, 9, 10, 11 degrees, on GTS2, GTS3; 8, 9, 10 degrees on GTS4. Featured shafts include Project X Titan Black, Mitsubishi Tensei 1K White, Tensei 1K Blue, Tensei 1K Red ($1,499 ($NZ1,669) with premium Graphite Design shafts). GTS drivers are available for fittings and pre-sale now and will be in golf shops worldwide from June 11.
3 Cool Things
1. Material difference. Introduced in 2024’s GT driver line-up, Titleist’s proprietary matrix polymer was a game-changer in weight-savings. In the GTS line-up, the composite piece moves from a crown wrap to covering the full body of the club. Nearly 60 percent of the drivers’ surface area is made up of the material (but only 13 percent of the mass), which is made of carbon fibre impregnated with a polymer resin that is one-third the mass of the surrounding titanium yet can be tuned to Titleist’s preferred sound frequency.
“We’ve gained almost 30 grams of discretionary mass that we have at our fingertips, and we always think of discretionary mass as gold in designing a driver,” said Stephanie Luttrell, Titleist’s senior director of metalwood R&D. Luttrell remembers a time not all that long ago when having one or two grams to play with in a design was the most you could get from an all-titanium construction. “The more of it that you have, the more you can leverage to pinpoint [centre of gravity] or to drive higher MOIs [moment of inertia, a measurement of stability on off-centre hits], to bring new fitting capabilities, and to re-engineer shapes for aerodynamics.”
The full line-up of GTS2, GTS3 and GTS4 manage all of those aspects, including smoother curved sections and slightly raised aft sections for improved aerodynamics, shapes that would compromise forgiveness and low spin without the light weight of the PMP material in the body. Perhaps more importantly, though, the saved mass also allows weight to be concentrated in the rear of the driver for forgiveness and the front of the body for better speed and lower spin.
“We’re using CG position to deliver launch and spin characteristics, but then being able to load the back part of the head and create essentially a larger barbell, allows us to increase that stability with these drivers over where we were with GT,” Luttrell says. “It’s about using more concentrated materials to drive those material properties even further.”
Another benefit of the weight savings is increased adjustability options through the three models. That means new front and rear adjustable weights on the GTS2 (a first for that player), a sleeker forward weight track and rear weight on GTS3 and GTS4 (new for that model also).
GTS4
2. Face facts. Titleist drivers have shown new developments in its variable face thickness designs over the recent launches in 2022 (TSR) and 2024 (GT), and the GTS line-up uses those learnings to find a new shape behind the face to maximise both on and off-centre hit ball speeds. While each model and even each loft vary slightly, the overriding feature is a ring around the perimeter of the face that becomes more open and U-shaped toward the crown. The ring feature is modified but with similar learnings that framed the GT drivers’ “speed ring” face technology. The opening at the top of the ring adds better deflection on impacts above the centre of the face but it also maintains speed for the best hits, too.
GTS3
“Our focus was to look at the geometry of the face, the hittable area of the face where players tend to miss most often,” Luttrell says. “Players, if they tend to miss, tend to miss higher on the face, or they’ve been instructed to tee it high, let it fly. So, we asked our engineers, ‘Is there anything that we can do without giving anything back?’ It’s a combined effort of essentially the ring being constrained, with almost a horseshoe-type shape where it closes at the top in such a way that you still get all of that spring effect at face centre.”
3. Model behaviour. The GTS2 driver will again be the choice for players prioritising forgiveness. It features lower spin than previous models, and there’s added adjustability with 11 and five-gram front and rear sole weights to tweak trajectory and spin. Flipping the weights changes the CG position by about 2.5 millimetres with respect to the face, Luttrell said. She noted that with the heavier weight in the rear there’s more dynamic loft in the head coming into impact, along with as much as 300 additional RPM of spin.
The deeper-faced GTS3 again offers lower launch and lower spin than the GTS2, as well as again including a five-position weight track in the front of the sole to help players optimise a CG location for their swing and typical impact.
The GTS4 offers a more dramatic re-tooling, taking on increased forgiveness with a larger shape. Titleist fans may notice that the GTS4’s shape borrows heavily from the TSi3 of four years ago. It offers the most forward and lowest CG of any of the three models, and for the first time offers the five-position weight track in the front of the sole.
Luttrell said that the range of depths of CGs throughout the line stretches eight millimetres from GTS4 to the GTS2 with the heavy weight in the rear, and that positioning has become fundamental in its approach to fitting.
GTS4
“One of the things I love to do is to have players hit a forward-weighted GTS4 and an aft-weighted GTS2 and look at the trajectory difference and see how much CG can impact ball flight and trajectory,” she said. “What we find is that, while it’s player dependent, as you move CG depth further back, there is more, shaft lead, essentially a more dynamic face closure, and so it tends to produce more draw-bias. With the CG further forward, the shaft and the CG alignment holds the face more open and it tends to be more fade-biased for more players than that. Depending on your delivery, we can use that tool to help you get face to path more square. Having those options and being able to now align them and essentially line them up and fit along that that continuum is a powerful tool in the hands of fitters.”
