Golf Drivers- Distance, Distance, and More Distance

The driver is considered the second most important club in the golf bag after the putter. This is because it can normally be used 14 times per round on a typical par 72 golf course, and more importantly because the tee shot sets up each hole. An accurate drive can make the rest of the hole seem easy, while a drive that is off line and in the rough, fairway trap, or behind a tree or in a water hazard can cause enormous problems and make par almost impossible.

Golf Driver Evolution
Golf drivers have changed enormously over the past 10-15 years. If you have been away from golf for some time and suddenly decide to pick up the game again, you’ll be in for a slight shock when you try one of today’s modern drivers. First of all the price will be a slap in the face. It is not the least bit unusual for today’s top brands to cost $500 or even more for a driver. The next thing that will catch your attention is the enormous size of the club head. Today’s top driver models typically have the number 460 in them, because the club head is 460 cubic centimeters (cc). This is now the maximum allowable size for the head of a driver. Shaft technology has changed a great deal, and the combination of today’s flexible graphite shafts, along with the club head technology and that of today’s modern golf balls are what produces the prodigious drives that are typically seen each week on the PGA tour. The ladies have benefited a great deal as well. The top woman golfer, Lorena Ochoa from Mexico, weighs only about 115 pounds, but her drives often fly 270 yards or more. When this author was a boy, the longest hitter of that time was a player named George Bayer. Bayer was a large man, probably 6’4” or more, and he had a powerful swing. He would hit the ball about 275 yards off the tee at that time, and of course that was considered very long. A good drive for male PGA tour players was 250-260 yards in those days, and drivers and other woods actually were made of out wood, typically a hard wood such as persimmon. Today it is not unusual to watch a PGA tour tournament on TV and see drives by the longest hitters in the 320-340 yard range using titanium club heads. Distances like that would have been unthinkable in Bayer’s day.

Driver Club Head Evolution
A 460 cc club head is rather enormous. Why have driver club heads evolved to this state, and what advantages do they provide to the golfer? First of all, the reason that driver heads can be so large is because they are made of light weight titanium material. Titanium is strong and flexible, and today’s top lines of clubs offer a spring or trampoline effect. That is, when the club hits the ball, the face of the drive actually bends inward similar to what happens when a person jumps on a trampoline. When the club face recoils it thrusts the ball out faster than it would otherwise travel, and thus greater distance is obtained. The rules of golf now limit the amount of spring that can be provided by a driver’s club head. If this were not the case then each year new models made of different materials would come out and drives would get ever and ever longer. Before long all the golf courses would be out dated. That has already been the case for many courses, and oftentimes golf holes have needed to be lengthened to keep up with the greater distances provided by today’s drivers and golf balls. Another major benefit of today’s large driver clubs heads is a larger MOI, which stands for moment of inertia. To make a long story short, a larger MOI means that the club head will not twist as much on off-center hits. The result is a better shot even on swings that miss the sweet spot by a certain amount. A miss-hit with one of today’s 460 titanium drivers will mean losing a bit of distance, but the same amount of miss-hit with an old wooden persimmon driver would result in a shot that would be comparatively much worse.

Of course most golfers love the extra distance that the new high-tech drivers provide. There is a downside to all this, however. That is, the longer the drive, the more difficult it is to keep the ball in the fairway.