The guys from paying.
They've kind of showed me how much the equipment matters. I just love that I can hit any shot.
I kind of want we're gonna be able to tell some fun stories about what goes on here to help golfers play better golf.
Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Ping proven Grounds podcast. I'm Shane Bacon, joined as always by Marty Jerts, and we've got doctor Paul Wood with us to go over the new G four forty irons. Paul and I want to start here because beauty matters a lot in terms of golf clubs, and these irons are beautiful. Are these some of the most aesthetically pleasing irons you've made?
I would say so. I would say so. I know Marty's been designing irons for longer than I have, Particularly in a game improvement iron, it's a lot harder to make a bigger iron look sexy, and I feel like we've done a really good job with it and packed it on in there.
Yeah, Marty's showing it off over there. Marty, I mean, you talk about game improven irons, and of course you know you can look at a blueprint iron and it looks very clean. Yeah, these look clean and normally, as Paul said, that that doesn't fit in a category all the time.
Yeah. I mean one thing Shane we've talked about a lot is you know, you know, to make an iron look like this, so it looks like it doesn't have much of a cavity look to it. The cavity's kind of covered a lot of times. What would happen if you put a cover on it or structure there, geometry there, it would inhibit something that we're trying to do with it, which is to get the face to flex. So Paul,
I think we should start there. Tell us a little bit about the face flexing, how we've kind of infused some distance into this iron category.
Yeah, great place to start. And like you said, a lot of the things we do for performance, there's a trade off with the looks and sound and feel. So a lot of the we want to get the face to flex. If we want this iron to go far and to go high, the more we can get the face to flex the better. So a bigger cavity, a thinner face. But all those things make it want to look like a big cavity back iron, and they make
it want to sound like a cowbell. So what's great with the pure flex badge is it's got I mean, you can see on here. It's a nice thick badge. It's got some depth to it. It fills the cavity. It looks amazing. But what we're trying to do is avoid it inhibiting the face flexing. So that's what the pure flex refers to. This one has four different little facets that can all flex independently. It allows the face to do its job and flex. And then it's those
vibrations after the impact. Those are the ones that cause the sound. Those are the ones we're trying to damp down. So that initial big vibration that is impact, we want to let that go. The ones after impact are the ones we want to damp out.
Paul, you talk a little bit about flex, you and you said, you say four. There's there's basically four parts of that that flex. Is that what you're saying exactly?
Yeah, So each part can kind of move independently, and so it just allows the whole face to bend and flex and this thing stays out of the way.
Is the point of that When you're talking about a game improvement? Iron is that for somebody that's maybe not hitting in the center of the golf club every time. It allows the club to still, you know, react or in a way where the ball might go in at least in the area they're hoping it goes.
Yeah. And you know, just like a metal would you know, the waste to increase bull speed and get the face moving. The more the face is bending and the less the ball is squishing, the more energy stays in the collision, and the more speeds you get, So the more we can get face moving, the better.
Shane, I like to think about our iron designs to simplify it for our fitters and our consumers, is we have the irons where you the player brings the speed right, this is blueprint T blueprint as I two thirty. I two thirty has a little flex in the face get the ball up in the air. Then we have an iron, our irons where we're gonna supplement the speed with the club design. And that's right where the four to forty stands.
This kind of fun little demo. If you if you push your thumb in the middle there, do you see how much that badge is flexing up? Paul tell the story of how we kind of discovered what the badge was doing. Right a few years ago, we ran that test on the ping Man.
Yeah, so we've you know, so we've known for a while we if we make the facest thin as we can will maximize ball speed. So we tried, let's just take the badge out completely and you know, put our fingers in our ears because the thing sound super loud.
But then you can start to really quantify like what happens on ping Man when the badge is there, and then you just pop it out, keep exactly the same swing, see what's changing where things are moving, and then you start adding things back in and go what can we add back in to damp out the sound to make it look better. That doesn't touch performance. That's the trick.
When you look at G four forty, who are you looking at in terms of a player. What's the player that's going to look at these irons and put them in the bag.
It's a pretty wide group. I mean, I think you know, it's game improvement for a reason, Like most of these customers are people looking to get better at the game. Most of these players, like Marty said, don't have a ton of speed. I think that would be a big distinguishing factor. If you're hitting your seven nine two hundred yards, you probably don't need this set of ions. But for the other ninety nine point nine percent of golfers out there,
it's a pretty good spot. But I mean the range of handicaps anything from total beginners to certainly single figure handicap golfers. And we've had some tour players play the gis I work for a lot of people, they're not too big.
Yeah, I mean that's kind of a little bit of what we talked about in terms of look is you know, they look great. So if a player was gonna maybe throw up maybe a big four iron in the back or something like that. I mean, Marty, you were telling me you were testing these irons out and your seven irons are going two ten. I mean you can get
some major distance. Probably not something you're really looking for in terms of what you might play, but when you think about what these irons are capable of doing, I mean, you can hit them a pretty long ways. The one thing I wonder about is spin. You know, when you think about a game im proven iron, something like the G four forty, how do you you know if you get to hit the ball kind of low, and you're not hitting the ball super far, how do you still make those iron spin?
So when I was I was hitting them earlier today, Shane, and I was still it flew like yeah, two five, two ten with the seven iron, which I don't need that much distance per se with my seven iron, but my spin rate was still like sixty five hundred, which is only a few hundred rpm down from where I normally am with my blueprint irons. So I think that's a very big component of the four forty iron design
right now. There's a lot of irons in the market for the high handicapped golfer where there's kind of this low spin epidemic a little bit where golfers are you know, kind of might look good in the indoor fitting bay that your iron's going a little bit further on your simulator, but they go play golf and their spin rate with the seven irons forty five hundred or something. We've definitely seen that. I've seen that when I've played in pro ams.
So when you when you're saying that, I mean that's an iron that let's say you're hitting a six iron into a green that's laying on the front of the green and rolling off the back of the green like yeah, getting no, No, there's no capability of actually stopping that on the grounds.
We like to call it stopping power, right, which which is we can quantify this a bunch of different ways. It's kind of your peak height, your land angle, combination of those things. We have a lot of great fitting tools for this. But that was a big priority in the four forty is Hey, yeah, we want this thing to compete from a distance standpoint. It is actually really good to help somebody hit a seven iron instead of in you know, instead of a six iron from that spot.
But let's still have that ball be able to stop the ball on the green. So Paul tell us a little bit about like kind of the engineering meat and potatoes that allows that to happen in the four to forty iron.
Yeah, So you know, one of those things is being able to go really thin in the face, and obviously by doing that we get more bull speed. More ball speed is more distance. The other major thing we've done in this iron, said, is to bring the center of mass down, and that's a theme with the whole g
four to forty line. And there's a trade off. As you move the center of mass down, you're getting that center of mass more in line with where impact is, you're getting a better energy transfer and again more distance. Like you go a little higher, the trade off often is with forgiveness, and so as you're moving mass down, it's going slightly counter to moving mass out sometimes and
it all depends where you're starting from. So we've spent the last sixty five years engineering forgiveness into the irons. We can afford to make a little bit of a trade off, go down in center of mass and still have the most forgiving iron out there, but relative to the G four to thirty, this goes just that little bit higher, which, as you know, we can get stopping by from spin or we can get it from height or both, and we're doing a little bit of both with.
The sign YEP.
I mean, is this feedback you guys get from people that play paying I'd love for the ball to spin a little bit more with the game improvement level iron.
Yeah, I think it depends who you talk to. I think the average consumer doesn't frame it like that. They want they say, I want to I want to be able to hit it further, but still have the ball stop on the go, and they're not necessarily articulating it in terms of Yeah, so we do as much interpreting what that means to us in terms of launching spin.
But yeah, exactly. I think that's something we've heard that when they're buying the irons, they want them to be competitive, and like Marty said, our goal here is not to make the longest seven iron, but we want to make a long seven iron that is the most functional on the course and helps you stop in it all.
So, Paul brings up a very good point. If you increase ball speed alone and keep the same initial launch in same spin rate, you're going to achieve a higher peak height in more stopping power. It's one of the benefits. It's like hybrids. Generally, if you tested a hybrid versus a long iron, it will launch the initial launch will be slightly lower, quite often interesting, but it will end
up going way higher. So people perceive that it launches higher, but it's really more about the peak height in the stopping power, right, Paul.
Yeah, what you see is when you look up, how high is the ball in the sky, You're not seeing the launch angle as much.
How about the new length progression with the g irons.
Yeah, so we have. We've basically squeezed slightly longer gaps between from starting at the seven iron, seven and six, six and five, five and four and the whole goal there was you know, we know that talking of feedback from this customer, most of these players struggle to get the distance out of a five iron or a four iron that they would like or maybe they used to get. So doing everything we can to help that customer get
a little more functional gaps. So what we've done is you've gone from five eighths inch length and comments to three quarters. It's not a huge change, but it adds up once you get to like the six sign the five to four, and that's just enough. A little bit of extra length is giving you just a little more speed, a little more height, a little more distance. And now if we gave that length progression to Marty, you'd start to get gaps that are too big, yeah, because you
have so much speed to start with. But in the hands of someone who's the core audience for this, that just helps go from not enough gap to functional.
So we've got a half inch increment in length from seven iron and up. Then now three quorders, and we've also seen Shane We've talked about on the pod a lot. Even with the tour players playing a lot of high lofted fairway woods and things of this nature, that length progression helps blend also a little bit with either hybrids or high lofted fairy woods.
Yeah, exactly, a hybrid's a little bit of a jump from where the irons are, and then the ferry woods quite a bit more. Again, so this just helps bridge that gap a little more.
I mean, Marty, I was wondering about blended sets. I mean, it feels like this could play into some of the players out there that are leaning towards a blended set. I mean, I know that's been extremely popular for the last few years with ping in particular, is not just sticking to one iron in your bag, but potentially going two and three different irons in your bag.
Yeah, definitely. I think we really design our two thirty blueprints to kind of be super easy to do with that. But the four forty, like a four or five iron, would be an awesome kind of blended set because the launch, the height, and now the look and feel. I mean, every year we launch a g iron, I think they get better looking, and this is gonna be the best looking yet obviously.
I mean in the summer, and by the way, when it gets kind of hot here in Arizona, I'm gonna imagine you throwing like the three iron in there that goes about two eighty five and never even have to head driver. I could see that right up your alley. But I mean that is one of the benefits of
having so many options. I mean, when you think about the options, and you stated earlier, I mean kind of going through some of the irons that Ping has, is you could lean into something like that even if you were a great player in Paul, I know you mentioned earlier. I mean it's not exactly specific to a certain golfer out there, but multiple golfers could play multiple irons, but potentially lean into the four forty.
Like, like we said, they're not that big, they don't look they don't have a huge bulky top rail. They looked apart. So I think there's a lot of golfers who could try them and find they work really well.
Paul, Let's talk a little bit about some of the things we've learned about this customer from our Arcos data. In our Arcost partnership. You know, what are some of the insights we've seen that have helped informed decisions we've made, whether it's groove design or finish or where are they on the are they in the rough from a certain spot or the fairway? From our ARCOS data, can you give it? Tell us a few examples here?
Yeah, no, now you're speak in my language. This is.
For those all.
I'm a mathematician, so this is my kind of thing. So in our Arcost data set, you've got this wonderful experiment of thousands of players playing these kind of irondsets, and we just look at where are they going on the course, what are they doing? And like you said, some simple things we can do or look at. Okay, for everyone paying playing G four to thirty irons, what are their average gaps? You know, where are they short?
You know, where they starting to fall off in terms of they don't hit the four iron anywhere near as far as they think they do. Are we seeing miss tennancies left and right? A big one, like you mentioned, is where are they hitting from? So we can look at how often are they in the fairway, how often are they in the rough? How often are they are
for tea. I mean, one thing that we talked about, which is when you think about it, it makes sense, but we'd never really thought about it, was like, with a seven iron in hand, you're almost equally likely to be in the fairway, in the rough or hitting off of tea because there's a bunch of path threes out there that you may well be hitting a seven iron you're not. You know, nobody hits every fairway and the
average golfer hits maybe half of fairways. So it makes a ton of sense that we need that iron to be functional, not just from the fairway where we do a lot of testing, but out of the rough, which then brings in well, you know, that makes it really important to have the best groove profile we possibly can off of tea. We need to know how it performs, like high on the face as well as in the
middle of the face, all that kind of stuff. So has been great for that, and when you're aggregating over one hundred million shots in the database, some really interesting stuff pops out.
Paul, we talk a lot about sound in terms of golf clubs, and I feel like most of the time we focus that the conversation around woods and drivers. How important is sound when you're designing a new iron.
Yeah, I'd argue it's every bit is important, if not more important in some ways. It just like with mental woods. Everyone has their tastes, what sounds good, what doesn't. But you're it's not just what's pleasing, right. If it was just about making a pleasing sound, we'd make it, make a perfect a note or something right. It's more about matching up the expectations of what you think is going to happen and what happened to inform the next shot. Right.
So we're using that feedback when we're making the next golf shot. Right. You want to know, like do I get some information about where I hit that on the face? Do I does the sound match up with my expectation of what just happens. So it's not just a like dislike, it's actually helping you play about a golf interesting.
I mean, it's a part of feel, right, like sound is a part of your feel.
Sound and feel pretty much interchangeable, and often when people say feel they mean sound right and vice versus. So it's the fascinating topic and totally different wing of engineering, but a lot of it's psychology but a lot of it's what you describe a sound isn't necessarily matching the physics of the sound. When you say it's loud, that doesn't necessarily mean decimals. That might mean frequency, or it might mean you know how much the sound is ringing out.
And that's odd job to figure out. When you say I don't like it it's loud, what does that actually mean in the physics?
What are you trying to actually tell me? I mean, already, this is a big thing you've talked about in terms of practice. You know, you're practicing without stuff in your ears because sound is such an important part of when you're actually playing golf, Like you play play golf against your buddies. You don't have air pods in right, And I mean when you're practicing, if you're not listening to the golf shot, you might not be getting exactly what you're trying to get out of it.
Yeah, it's a good home experiment if you want to see if you can feel the difference between two clubs or two putters, put noise canceling headphones on and try to discern a field difference and you'll find out for yourself that. Yeah, it's probably mostly sound that you just driving your field.
Marty. I'm excited for your family to to to send us notes about how they come to you. And you've got the air canceling things in the SIEM trying to hit different.
Show and research over here.
I promise you you have done it. If anybody's done, it's been you. Paul.
Let's talk a little bit about the shafts. So it's part of going longer in the long irons. You know, some that we've had a few versions of was a shaft technology called AWT, which stands for a sending weight technology. A lot of the shafts out there are actually heavier in the long irons and then get lighter in the short irons. AWT kind of does the opposite tell us about the genesis of that chef family in the in the new AWT three point zero.
Yeah, this has been fun. Like you mentioned, you know, typically when you're designing a set of sea steel shafts, right, the longest shaft, which would be the longest iron, would be the heaviest, and as you start chopping that shaft down, it would be the lightest. So it makes sense that in the early days all iron shafts were descending weight.
As you went from the three iron to the wedge, they got lighter, But actually, when you look at the whole rest of the set, the lighter shaft in the bag is the driver yep, where we're trying to squeeze as much speed out of it as possible and get the ball up in the air. The heaviest shaft in the bag is your wedg shaft, where we're trying to be all about control, we're not trying to squeeze out more speed. So just intuitively, and I think ascending weight was your idea in the first place.
Right, Descending weight didn't make sense.
Exactly, and then we had that conversation in whatever two thousand and nine or something. It just makes sense to try to blend the weight of the shaft for what you're trying to do, which is in the long iron you want to get more speed and get the ball up in the air. A lighter shaft helps with that, and in the wedge you're trying to get more control, more precision, and the heaviest shaft helps her that. The challenge is it's not easy to make steel shafts in
this ascending weight fashion. I think we did a good job with our first AWT, but it's really hard to make them all feel similar. In AT two, we did a great job making them making them feel great, and so that's been hard to beat for a long time. This is the year we finally feel like we have a new shaft that's new and improved over AWT two.
So we've just extended that ascending weight technology. Now it's on average about a three gram difference from shaft to shafts, so like going from the six to the seven is a three gram difference, whereas in the a ET two it's about two grams. So we kept it simple there and just what that means is we've been out to
blend that even better. So particularly in the long irons there, they still have the stiffness that you need, but they're lighter than they are in the previous year in the previous irons, so they're easier to get the ball up in the air. Our testing shows more ball speed, higher launch just helps with more distance in the long irons.
Paul, it's twenty twenty five and yet we can't get away from the I to the wedge. You think about it continuing to be a part of the family. I know it's a part of the four to forty as well.
Yes, yes, So one of the bits of research, in fact, partly inspired by our Arcos research, partly inspired by consumer research, is this customer in general is telling us they really want more help in bunkers with their sandwidg Well, what
better club as they've been out there than the itwo soundwarch. Yeah, and so there's a lot of aspects of the Sandwidge in this set that are inspired by I wouldn't say it's a complete recreation of the ITO, but as you look down at it, you'll see some of those features that made it so good. In the bunker, we've incorporated some of the shaping of the head. That's the necking of the hozzle, you know, that has a distinct look, but it's there for a reason. It goes through the
sand better than a traditional hozzle. So we've incorporated those to maximize how easy it is to get these shots out of the bunker.
Marty, It's always crazy to me as we go in the new technology new clubs at Ping, how you guys and everybody kind of behind the scenes will touch history. We'll go back twenty thirty years and find, you know, little nods that work in today's technology, in today's golf club's manufacturing, and you kind of think about the history. It never really goes away.
Yeah, even even get into the length progressions. I mean Carston built that into the original itos was non linear lengths, right, It didn't make sense to him. He was he was charting things out. He was charting lofts versus length instead of club number versus length. So some of these ideas are you know, just kind of old ideas applied to modern Yeah.
Yeah, old ideas, but you could use all the technology now atay and make them sing.
You know what.
One of the big ones, Shane I'm excited about is bringing our kind of trajectory tuning lobe system to our fitting environment. So now with the AFS we call it ANFS three D and three D stands for three dimensional fitting. We can fit multiple color codes, are ligle, and do
power spec in one fitting head. So customers are going to be able to play around with color code and it looks a lot better with the sleeve on it and be able to experience a power spec And actually with the four to forty we also have retro spec fitting heads in our AFS fitting cart. So Paul tell us a little bit about, you know, fitting for spin rates. Who might be a good candidate for retro, Who might be a good candidate for power Yeah.
No, it's a great question. I mean we've seen this. You know. We build the standard specs of the gions to the middle of the bell curve, right, that's kind of the whole point. There's a population out there. We fit the middle of that bell curve. But then there's plenty of people on the two ends of that bell curve, and interestingly enough, like myself and my dad would be good examples off two ends of that spectrum. I hit the ball really high. I have a decent amount of speed,
but I'm not like you guys. But I'm a good candidate for power spec because I'm hitting the ball high. I'm getting a lot of spin, and so actually i can increase distance quite a bit without losing stopping power because I'm at the high stopping power end of the spectrum. So power spec for me. He just brings it down a little, brings the spin down from high to medium, and everything's good. My dad's the opposite. He's very hands forward.
He doesn't have a lot of speed, but the ball doesn't go high, and so for him, he actually like going up and loft actually helps him game distance even in a seven nine. Interesting, Yeah, because he's low low spin, low spin, like low enough launch angle that actually going up in loft is helping him gain distance. Now that's not always the case. Sometimes it's it's really a stopping PIW versus distance trade off. But there's plenty of people
out there. When you talk a lot to coaches and you say how many players need to launch the ball a bunch higher, there'll be a lot of hands raised fall.
I mean, you're you're screaming what we scream a lot on this podcast Get Fit. I mean it seems like, I mean, it's a big part of this. I mean, you're you're explaining it as well, Marty. I mean it seems like there's no iron maybe that ping produces that's more important to get Fit than the four forty.
Yeah, And I just love that we're not just fitting for langle, right, We're not just fitting for left right, we're fitting for spin because yeah, all these Paul's shallow. You rarely take a divot right with your irons right, So he just doesn't have as much shaffling in his dynamics. My father in law is very similar to your dad. It sounds like like like a decent amount of shaffleing.
And so you're not going to change those swings. You got to fit the club to those And because we custom build all of these here, we we loft and lie themall so it's it's no extra cost to get to get your iron styled in and fit your spin window. And we have a lot of great fitting tools and co pilot and charts and things of that nature to help guide our fitters.
Marty, I love that you guys all know each other's golf swings. It's very it's like kind of cute, you know. You're like, I know how you swing, and I don't know how far Marty hits it. And it feels like it's across the board. Everybody kind of knows everybody's golf game.
I mean, why we're right here where we do the play testing, and quite often you'll be out and I'll be doing my playtest and Marty stood next to me doing his, and then suddenly I feel a little more self conscious about my swing. But it's it's kind of fun. You do you know you might have three tests going at the same time and you'll you'll watch each other doing the tests and hitting good shots, hitting bad shots.
How does player testing work for game improvement Irons? Because obviously if you think about something with the blueprint, you'd go to tour players. I mean you go to Victor Hoven and say, how does this look? How does this feel? Things like that. Who are you approaching in terms of testing out a game improven iron?
Yeah, it's a great question. So we still will utilize people like Marty, but but obviously he's not the target market, but will utilize the fact that he has a super consistent swing and we can look at differences. You know, we're testing out two shafts and we want to know
what's the true difference between those shafts. We get more repeatable data from a tour player or someone like a Marty, but we do as much of our like final testing as possible with the target audience, So people of the swing speed range, the handicapp range, and you you more data. It's it's often a little bit noisier data, but you need to test with the real people.
They are going to use that right so well, So exactly.
We'll do both, but we end up testing a wider pool of players with game improvement because the swings are less repeatable.
The G four forty Iron, as we mentioned off the top, it looks awesome obviously. It seems like it's got a lot of opportunity for a widespread group of players. And I mean it's not just as you mentioned, not just the player that hits it short. It could be for any player out there that might be looking for something. And as you said, there're spectrums as well for different types of players.
Yeah, one and every every year, Like we we're very proud of all the clubs we do, but there's always a bit of a favorite in there. Of which one do we think we really nailed it this year? You know, I think you could argue with the four thirty line the Driver was that with the four forty. I think a lot of us feel like the Iron is the superstar.
Here, Marty, you feel that way.
It's hard to hell, man, it's always hard to pick a favorite.
I was gonna say, you're always gonna lean driver. I see you over there.
I'm gonna go around a limb. I think the hybrid actually okay, because interesting they're I mean, you can't pick a favorite kid, Yeah, but the Hybrid launches a little higher, goes a little bit higher. I think we're gonna We're Hybrid is gonna be the little mini sleeper of the line in my personal opinion.
Yeah, I mean that is for months to come to really figure out which which clubs everybody's favorite, But for now we have some really really good ones. Uh, Paul, We always appreciate the time the irons look great, and we always appreciate the insight.
Thank you.
This is the Pink proven Grounds Podcast.