Episode 12: Driving: Distance vs. Accuracy

ball in the fairway. You think about US Opens and you know tough golf courses that we play each and every week, and players were dedicated to find the fairway first, and there was a lot of irons off tas and that mentality over the last decade or two has totally flipped and you're seeing I feel like it kind of started back in the Tiger VJ days, when VJ would just pound driver up fairways. They didn't care where it went.

And it's he's on from find the fairway, and that's the benefit to beat it off the t as far as you can hit it and go find it, and that's the advantage. So today I want to discuss with you driving in terms of distance versus accuracy and what is more important. And I want to start with this,

when did technology shift? When did the idea of you guys building golf clubs for distance in theory over accuracy, or maybe distance being more important than in theory accuracy shift like it did for the modern day player.

or average, and he had driving advantage. So I think it was that culmination of like, okay, Tiger's doing this, and then that con that metric of strokes gained and we got to get we all the industry has to give Mark Brody tons of credit for that absolutely writing his book. So it's like, okay, then we're still kind of connecting dots on those things to develop that kind of you know, to answer this question really is and it's really I think this is why I love doing

this podcast. It's not a binary answer. It's like what's more important distance or accuracy in the answer. It's not yes or no, right, this is there's nuance between those things. And what's really cool is that we've used some of that, like those analytics to help answer that question that we could talk about today, which is really fun.

lean on the two iron. I went through a time in college and just after college, or I don't want to say I necessarily had the driver yips, but I would hit this two iron all the time off teas because I could hit it in the two fifty range, you know, as a twenty two year old, and I could live with that, and it's funny because now I feel like the most reliable club in my bag in terms of finding a fairwear having to hit a pressure

pack golf shot is the Driver. I mean, the Driver has become one of my favorite clubs in terms of reliability, and it's just so wild to think of, like the old Shane and the way I thought about the driver versus you know this twenty twenty three version where when the hole's tight, I will tee the driver a little bit lower and kind of squeeze it out there.

hole gives you. Obviously, so there is a golf course dependent condition around this, which is quite fun because then we build tools to help answer that question. What's more important distancer accuracy, and today we're going to talk about this ratio of the two, Like what your golf course penalty is is a big part of that equation, that

calculus for you as a golfer. But yeah, I think we've seen a lot of players just both I think embrace the analytics of it as well as the driver being more forgiving and spending more time on that technique. And I think you're seeing that kind of the modern day and what you're experiencing me and the tour players is that culmination of that intersection of both of those things.

And I've had a couple buddies in my life that when driving went from like leaning a little heavy on the spin to be a little bit more accurate to taking spin off of these drivers and launching it really high and trying to get the most out of it in terms of the way you're hitting the golf ball. You know, you see Rory McRoy swing up at the golf ball so much and launching at whatever thirteen or fourteen,

and you feel like people should be doing that. And I'm interested in your thoughts on how players a ten handicap, at twelve handicap, a fifteen handicap should approach driving because it's their course dependent, Like you said, how do they play their particular golf course, but it's also maybe what suits the way they swing the golf golf club as well.

mindful of that dispersion. And for your club golfer, a gain of twenty yards off the tee is going to improve your strokes gain driving, ultimately lowering your score by two point three shots. So twenty yards is going to be two point three shots. If you're a PGA Tour player, twenty yards is one shot, right because your your game's already you know, everything's kind of already tightened up right,

so to speak. So that shows the value of gaining distance for your club golfer is even more important from a scoring standpoint, because after you drive it down there further, you're gonna have kind of less chances to compound errors between where you drive it and getting to the green right, So it shows that there is even more importance for the club golfer to hit the ball further. Now, let's

talk about accuracy. If for you to gain one shot in accuracy, which is left right dispersion, the PGA Tour player, if they tighten their their cone or their dispersion by seven yards, that would improve their strokes game driving. They would effectively save one shot around. But if you're that same eighteen handicap er club golfer player, you would have to improve your dispersion by ten yards. So you see,

we got in dispersion, we got seven yards. Ten yards is one shot, but from distance we have twenty yards being one shot around or two point three. So when you kind of do the math on that ratio for your club go, it's way more important or a bigger premium even than your tour player to emphasize gaining distance.

And I think that's something we even the good fitters out there might still have a little bit of that that you know, bias from the past, where hey, we need to tighten somebody's impact dispersion, We need to get you to hit more fairways. Well if somebody's already hitting it relatively straight. We've seen great success kind of shifting that mindset in your fitting to be a little bit

more give yourself permission. Is the fitter to consider a driver that might go further with uh maybe even the same or a little bit more offline it could be more beneficial for the player.

to your point, dispersion issues. Right, Oh, this driver's going right, I must be coming over the top of it, or I must be doing something to pull this golf shot. And it could simply be that shaft isn't right in your golf club. And one of my favorite parts about the fitting process is getting the head dialed, is getting the loft dialed, and then going through those processes with the shaft, because that shaft can do so much in terms of kind of tightening things up.

and then your psychology is freed up. You can have more of your natural release pattern right type of thing, and then you can swing harder and you hit it further, and you know that that one out of four, one out of five foul ball to the right is no longer going to be in there. So a lot of times it's gaining freedom from a specific miss type of thing. But one of the fun things Shane and shafts, we're

talking about the concept of shafts here. The topic shafts is how do we use shaft technology to influence this distance versus accuracy topic? And a big thing that we've done a lot of folks. I think for a while we were a little controversial because we had our driver at forty five and three quarters inches standard length right, and everyone's like, oh, you know, the tour players are playing drivers that are forty four and a half. You need a tighten dispersion, you go shorter, you're gonna hit

it straighter. All these things are kind of floating out there. We kept doing the research and we were like, well, we don't really see a compelling reason to go shorter as our stock length. We see that at a relatively longer length the golfer's gonna have their is getting a little technical, but shift their swinger actually a little more to the right. They're gonna hit more up on the ball. You mentioned Rory hitting more up a pod, more positive

angle of attack. Swinging more right is generally what a lot of the club golfers that come over the top and hit the wipe ye kind of slice out their need. But how do we have that longer length without losing without the club getting too heavy? Right? That's kind of the where we needed to innovate, and we spend a lot of time. We've evolved this technology over the last

decade plus of having super counterbalance shafts. So you look at our quote unquote stock shaft we like to call them proprietary, is called the Alta CB, and that CB stands for counterbalance, Okay, and that really is the secret sauchine of like the G four to thirty driver ALTA shafts being forty five and three quarter, that's the swing weight still perfect for the player. It's D two D three whatever we need to do to optimize it, and we still have a lot of mass in the head

so you can go longer, doesn't feel too heavy. To the golfer, but we still have that mask to get momentum. That's kind of all this is kind of working towards that concept. We're putting a premium on our default build to be biased for distance and while being mindful of accuracy.

the design of a driver. What are you looking for as you're going through that design process in terms of both accuracy and distance, Like what are the numbers that gets you excited? Are you gaining the five yards? Ten yards? You know, ping man swinging this thing? And it's a little tighter dispersion, like what are those numbers that you guys are looking to see before you maybe take it to your boss and go, hey, I think this is the one.

I do that, the moment of inertia goes up. And then we know predictively because we've made like we've made some really cool prototypes here, Shane, where we can have the same CG, but we can vary the moment of inertia. We'll put on the robot, we hit it all over the face, and we can kind of prove that hypothesis that higher moment of inertia will help you hit it straighter. Right. But the challenge is, and this is where I think we have really done it ping, is we want to

have high MOI. And this was kind of a thought in the market place for a long time. Oh, HIGHMI drivers always spin a lot, right, Well, well, we broke through that, right, you can have a high MOI driver that spins low. It's what our LST is. And some

of these other things. So we're really trying to move center gravity low, deep, but the right amount while maximizing MOI, and then the payoff to the golfer is being able to measure that both in player testing where we see increases in ball speed, distance, carry and dispersion, and also

put it on the robot. And we put on the robot, we can heat map the face, hit it all over the face in a nine position test and see, Okay, yes, I improve the moment of the inertia on this driver design, or I change the face shaping like our sponsistency, and we see higher ball speed across the face, we see better dispersion, and then connect those dots. Ultimately, Shane, it's the player testing because that's the real world what me and you and our golfer out there is going to experience.

That is the most fun to look at in our data analysis.

is two to one. So for every two yards you gain in distance, you can live with one more yard of offline. What does this mean? If you go get fit, if you go take your game or driver, then you're gonna go try our G four thirty with the alta CB might be a little longer than what you're used to. You got the launch conditions dialed in. It's twenty yards further. Right, if your dispersion. Most of the time we see our dispersion decreases because of all of our technology and inertia

and things of that nature. But if your dispersion is is it doesn't grow by more than ten yards right, you gain twenty down the fairway. As long as you didn't grow by more than ten yards of offline left or right, that will be a positive from a strokes gain driving or a scoring standpoint. And quite frankly, it's like it's fun. You can hit it by your buddies

and things of that nature. So what's really cool is that when you can hit it twenty yards further, and this is what we quite often see, and also keep your dispersion or tighten it, then you're really gonna compound those gains. And that's where you get more into the You know, your your driver fit gained you three or four shots around. We see that very often.

shafts is a system. So our counterbalance shafts is a super important part for most golfers that are playing our all to CB at forty five and three quarter, optimizing the headway and being able to deliver that to the golfer. So I think stacking things like the shaft the system design going a little bit longer, stacking with the G four to thirty. It's the thinnest face we've ever had, and a lot of that is borne through our modeling techniques, a lot of super compute and things we're doing on

the golf physics side. It's s consistency because you don't want to go out and pick the driver that you hit the furthest with your one best shot. That's something that I think you've seen our fitters and golfers get more used to is go out and evaluate drivers and look at your dispersion on all ten or twenty shots and your average distance on all those hits, because things like sponsistency, you're going to give you more distance when you hit it low on the face. So Shane, when

you're experiencing the four thirty going further, me too. A lot of it is we're not hitting it perfect. Every time your team at low you're hitting your stingers out there, they're going further. A lot of that is impacts that aren't perfectly centered right, So it's adding that up. It's adding moment of inertiaup. It's more ball speed through materials,

face design, more clubheits be through turbulators. You start stacking all these things up and that's where you get that compound interest and you can have drivers and we're we're doing it. We're seeing in real life that keep going a little bit further and or a little bit straight every time we launch one out in the market.

is a little bit bigger. This gets pretty nuanced, though, Shane, because what we've come to find out in this kind of fresh research is that the tour player also benefits from super high inertia, and the reason why is because the consequence of their misses at more distance and more speed is more severe. So very high inertia driver for a high speed player is also super beneficial. I think

the conclusion is high inertia and high forgiveness. Basically what your question was, impact around the face is a very big deal for all levels of golfers, and so we prioritize that through our testing that we do. I think using the CG shifter can kind of move where that perfect quote unquote sweet spot is or where the CG is, and it's a really big deal. I think we can

evaluate it in the fitting process. That thought, that kind of concept of the high toe shot, which is high you know, top left of the face for you, top right of the face for me, is a little bit that that that idea that you need to hit it in the high toe to get your furthest distance has kind of gone away. It was a it was something that exists, existed when when drivers had too high of spin to be perfect if you hit it in the

middle of the face. So what would happen with that high toeball You would hit it in the high toe and you would actually lose ball speed, right, Okay, but you spun it way less, and because you spun it way less, the ball would go further. So it actually wasn't the quote unquote hot spot from a ball speed standpoint, but it was the hot spot from a distance standpoint. Now we've innovated on our drivers, moved the CG lower.

Now your centered hit hopefully we'll have those perfect launch conditions. Right. So if the high towball goes the furthest for you, it means that your center hit is probably too high of spin to begin with. So that's just kind of something to be mindful of in the modern day of how we're kind of trying to dial in launch and spin. Marty.

to that? Is there ever going to be a point where that is, again what the computer tells us makes the most sense.

heal in tight totally. We miss them high and low and an ellipse pattern, and all of us have different ellipse patterns and shapes that are a little bit tilted. So if you get myopically focused on maximizing one thing, I think the lesson learned is that that will cost you an overall performance. So that is I think the big challenge that we're after in product development and fitting

and this topic of distance versus accuracy. There's nuance to all these things, and so how do you maximize overall performance? How can you have high inertial heel toe and high inertia high low and marry those two things together. And that's where our driver's designs have kind of been geared towards that overall on the course, all around performance. You can have distance and accuracy together. It's not a it's no longer a choice like high m I H high spin,

you're gonna hit it shorter, right. You can have both. You can have the ball speed, you can have the perfect launch conditions, you can have the M I. And it's all positive some and it's going to compound together.

here in the foul balls. Exactly, as long as you're not hitting the foul balls, you should be focusing on distance to accurate versus accuracy at a ratio of three to one if you're a tour player and two to one if you're a club golfer. We have some great examples of the Shane like Victor Hoblin is an awesome example. This from let's see two thousand and twenty to right now.

He has gained like eight to ten yards. If you go to Data Golf, look up his data, he has gained eight to ten yards and he's lost like one or two percent accuracy, but his strokes gained driving per round. So he's an example that gained distance, lost a little bit of accuracy. But the net benefit I think is he's he is a strokes gain driving improved like point three shots around some are right in there. That's a shot of tournament right and the distance he's gained in

the speed has helped his iron play. And Shane. One thing we interviewed Joaquin and we also know this about Victor. Both of them play a driver that's forty five and three quarter or Joaquin's like almost forty six, right, okay, so give yourself permission. I think for the listener out there to consider a driver over forty five in a quarter, right our tour average. I did a poll on Twitter actually, I said, hey, what do you think the average driver

distance is with our tour staff? And I put like forty four, forty four and a half, forty five, forty five and a quarter or something like that, And I kind of did it in that way on purpose. The right answer is forty five and a quarter. What most people picked was forty four and a half. I cannot believe people still think the average driver length is shorter

than it actually is. And again, a lot of that goes to the fact that our driver's so forgiving you can play a little bit longer, and Victor has really enjoyed that.

I'm hitting this driver a little bit further. The dispersion is this because it's hard to like take two drivers in a fitting and go simulate fairways hit or take them on the course and things of that nature. That's what tour players do. We want to build a tool that gives you that same level of access. So we

built this tool. It's called Club Compare, and you can go in here and pick like, okay, I got the G four to thirty versus my gamer, and you can put in how much the distance you're hitting the four thirty and then you take this number that you can get on a launch monitor. So this is really cool. You can actually have a measurement of your dispersion and either in a track man or foresight, both of them. It's kind of this plus or minus of side or plus or minus of offline, and that gives us a

quantitative metric for your left right dispersion. So you can go into this tool and put in your offline that you had with the four thirty in your fitting. They could say, okay, my gamer I came in with when a little bit shorter and the dispersion Let's say this version was the same, but you picked up like ten yards.

And this also answers that question of nuance Shane, if of it's dependent on your handicap, So if you're a higher handicap golfer, it's going to have that intelligence in there that it's going to put more importance on distance relative to accuracy versus a tour player or a lower handicap golfer. So you will get right here, you see we caught. Okay, we have the same dispersion. We gain ten yards and I think I put in eighteen handicapper.

That's one point one strokes gained from your distance, and obviously you have you have the same offline, So the strokes gains is not going to be an improvement and offline, but your total strokes gain is going to be one point one to eight. And we give you this little picture of on course. What does that mean from you

from an Ellipse standpoint? So this tool, let's go in here real quick and say, okay, let's say if your dispersion with your gamer was also so we gained distance and decreased dispersion, you click find a winner, right and you will get Now you gain two point six strokes game driving, we have you hitting it further and tighter.

So not only can you use this tool to compare your gamer versus our four to thirty if you go get fit for you can also compare I want to try the four to thirty at a longer length, different shaft versus the four to thirty with our tour shaft shorter and do that ab comparison and get some real quantitative analytics on on a driver comparison in a fitting. So our fitters here at the proving groundsmen absolutely loving this tool.

golf course is. There's three options in terms of your home club and where you're playing easy, medium or hard, which is very very important obviously to understand where you're playing your golf and then from there you just basically to Marty's point, can input and use this slider device to compare the four point thirty versus the game or you're using and boom, you hit a button and it explains it both with picture and information.

or Dobson or something like that. Yet that would be quote unquote easy driving course because there's not a lot of penalty right on the end. We actually develop those metrics based off of Kapalua on the PGA Tour is quote unquote the easiest driving course. It has the least penalty you kind of hit it anywhere. Then a very hard driving course is a Honda event. It was a pg National. Yeah, very penalizing if you missed the fairway. So that kind of gives folks a spectrum, and that's

what's important to consider where you play golf. Obviously, if you move all around, play all over the place you'd put medium because that kind of handles everything. But this tool handles all that level of complexity, math and nuance, and it makes it super actionable for our fitters. So you can have this conversation and go figure out what's more important versus accuracy for you in your fitting.

away with it. Our shafts, our counterbalance allow you to go to a little bit longer. The tour players are playing longer length drivers than you think Victor, Joaquin, all these guys, So hopefully this is help folks, and it quite frankly, Shane, it's fun to hit it far.

bit more controlled t ball. How often are they talking about distance on a week to week basis, considering how obsessed it feels like we are with the players that hit it the longest.

ceiling that you reach. We're hitting it. For Tony to hit a ten yards further won't actually gain him that much, Like it's more about hitting the fairway. But if you're Victor who was more average speed four years ago when he first came on tour. Now he's way above average, but when he was average, I mean I played with him in the Phoenix Open and he was I was hitting it by him, you know a little bit, but

he was. He was asking me about it. He was you could tell it was on his mind, Like, Man, I wish I could carry those bunkers that are those cross bunkers that Tony doesn't have to worry about, but I do. Like this is very agitating.

are super long. They're more about being mindful of of of you know, hitting more fairways.

player that he is. But I have not seen him do that lately outside of when he was having fun in Utah there a couple summers ago.

swing later he hits up six. His angle attack goes from down four to up six and he hits it like thirty yards longer. And I think the lesson learned for the everyday golfer is that straightening your ballflight will gain you distance. Okay, and uh, if you have ample speed like you, you can hit little cuts for control and things of that nature, but you don't want to be curving it too much, because then that's going to

start costing you too much distance. Going back to this, topic today, which is what is more important distance or accuracy. So you know, we see the only the very long tour players hitting it with a significant amount of curve, most of them when they're hitting draws and fades, it's pretty minor, like your beautiful little cut you've been hitting down hitting down there lately.

It's just so wild how all of this stuff changes and deviates and improves, and a lot of it comes down to the technology that people like you and Ping do to make it easier on the golfer.

the club in their bags. So great insight, Marty. And again just a reminder if you're listening to this, If you downloaded the podcast and you want to kind of see what Marty was talking about, go on YouTube. You can even fast forward to the time stamp in terms of when this landed and when we really got in

to the tools. But I think it's great to visually look at what Marty was talking about because it'll help you understand the benefits of bringing up some of these tools that you guys have and some of the tools you guys have out there for your fitters.

Trying to make again that make the complex simple. Which driver's going to be better, Like you know, this one a little further but that one went a little bit straighter, and and it doesn't mean you need to lean on this to one hundred percent make your decision, but use that with all the other things that you're experiencing in the fitting to to help upgrade your decision. And uh, yeah, this is a super fun topic. I think folks are

gonna enjoy this. Uh you know, it's it's kind of like a never ending debate, you know, distance versus accuracy. So hopefully folks will level up their knowledge a little bit after this pod.