Have you ever noticed that, as the years pass, the heads on drivers tend to get bigger?I have, and have often wondered why golf companies employ this gimmick to try and pull the wool over the eyes of their customers.
You may recall a couple of years ago, when the USGA began imposing restrictions on how big a driver head, and therefore the size of the driver face, could be. This is because a driver with a bigger face area has a bigger “spring-face,” or the ball speed off the face, which gives you more distance. This led the USGA to impose a limit on how much “spring-face” could be created. So it would seem like, the bigger the driver face, the better your distance as a golfer, right?
Wrong.
The problem with this approach is that when designers make bigger drivers, they also have to make the faces of those drivers thicker, which prevents them from generating a ball that would travel faster than the USGA’s limit allows. This means that just because your driver has a large head, it isn’t necessarily any better for your game.
For some people, this is a good thing, because larger driver heads mean that they have a center of gravity which would be farther back than a smaller driver. This will increase the height of the shot over a smaller head of the same loft when using the same shaft and can be helpful for golfers who need a higher ball flight to improve carry distance.
However, it’s hard for the average golfer to discern these kinds of things on their own, and many just revert back to using larger driver heads instead of consulting with professional clubmakers, who can advise you as to which advances in club manufacturing are gimmicks, and which ones can truly improve your game.