Self Help Fitting: Driver

BY Paul Smith

In the club fitting article, we talked about the club fitting interview process and looked at a general shot profile a player might employ when trying to make the best choices as to which clubs to carry. In this article, we will look more closely at the necessary information a player can gather for the club fitter.

Top-tier players all have collected statistics on their games and have compared them to those of their peers. Statistics are very useful in exposing weaknesses, both in swings and in club choices too.

Let’s break the game down into five club types, which fall into the following categories:

• Drivers
• Fairway Woods or Hybrids
• Irons
• Wedges
• Putters

How can we know what sort of set make-up will be most useful to us in the shortest time? We carry with us our “stats” book, say perhaps five to ten rounds, and we map out our game, shot-by-shot. It is a simple thing to do, but very few players make the effort, yet many spend hard-earned dollars on ill-fitting equipment based on emotion and marketing gimmicks.

Gathering information about your entire game on a scorecard is not something you wish to do during competition rounds, as it is a little time consuming. So, begin with one club, your driver, and subsequently, club-by-club, in later rounds, add the information you have collected on the rest of your clubs until you have concluded the experiment, having progressed through your entire club set.

What Information Should You Gather?

Essentially, you can make a record of how you hit the driver, how far, the resulting shape of shot, and whether it was struck fat or thin.

The idea is that seeing ten rounds of driver golf written in front of you will be a real revelation of what you actually have don, as opposed to what you think you have done. And there is a difference – surveys have shown that 85% of players overestimate how far they hit the ball. Ego lengthens shots, stretching out the length to manly guestimations, but few players in reality are as long as they wish they were.

For those of you who are computer savvy you can build a spreadsheet that can be used later to record the information for every shot in a round of golf, including ground-run time, preserving as much ego as possible. Still, though not perfect, it is information that you can use to improve your game because the stats will highlight game or equipment weakness quickly. If a club fitter is given this sort of information, even without launch monitors and so on, he has a running start on the process.

Back to the driver now: let’s assume the player in question is a strong person, who really does swing hard – 185 metres of distance off the tee is not gorilla territory, so we should be able to find something that will help both the distance and directional issues at hand. First thing to consider is the slice, or mailing the ball out to the right of the fairway.

The ball comes off a clubface at 90 degrees to the face, where it is aiming, when it separates from the face. So, if balls starts to the right, we know the face is open to the intended flight line at this point. A fitter’s partial cure for this can be to offer a player a closed-faced club – one which in the set up position will have the face aiming slightly to the left as shown in Figure 1.

In many instances, this single change in club design will alleviate a players’ biggest problem. How closed the face needs to be is dependent on individual swing characteristics. This works because with an closed faced club head, the player’s hands swinging back into what would have been an open position, are now square which is illustrated in Figure 2 (vs the closed initial set up position).

The closed face driver has one other design thing going for it. As the club face opens into impact (to be square) additional loft is added to the face. This improves launch angle, which does have a dampening effect on sideways motion.

Please note that using a closed-face driver is a band aid fix for a swing issue that, whilst curable, would take time and effort. The closed-face driver is there, conveniently, for weekend warriors or those who do not have the time to fix a problem swing.

Another option available now is the dial-in weights on a driver head, used so that the hosel end of the face is heavier as shown in Fig 3. This encourages the club head to close during the swing and may cure some slicing problems. Fig 4 and 5 shows how the club face “should” properly close, with Fig 6 showing the club head post impact.

Launch Angle

So now we may have found a helping hand regarding direction off the tee. Next is a real look at the proper launch angle to help the ball stay airborne for as long as possible.

There is less friction in the air than on the fairway, so maximising carry is always helpful. So find a driver that has, if possible, 1.5 or 2 degrees more loft on the head than the one you have been using, something between 10 and 12 degrees. When you hit this club you will think you have sent your ball into orbit, but chances are it will be a longer drive than it would have been had you used your old standby, perhaps a 9° loft. But if your ball flight was way too high and stalls, then it is pretty obvious that the desired loft lies somewhere between the two clubs, perhaps a 10.5°. Whatever you do, do not get fooled by that lower so-called more penetrating type of shot that runs like a scalded cat. It just does not go as far as a truly flighted ball.

Quite often you will find that, if you have taken a 9° square-faced driver from a player and replaced it with a 9° loft with 2° closed-face, the ball will fly much higher, too. Now try a 10.5 with a closed face, and see how that goes. In essence, the 10.5 closed face flies at the equivalent of a 12.5 loft. Does anyone relate to having tried the same lofted clubs at a demo day where some flew really high in comparison to another brand? You need to know the face angle as well as the loft to work out its dynamics. For every degree closed the face is it adds one degree of loft. Conversely, if the face is built open, it decreases the effective loft.

Centre of Gravity (COG)

I have not spoken about shafts at all yet and will look at shaft-fitting in a separate article. When it comes to fitting, the major influences on ball flight are loft, face angle, and the club head’s centre of gravity location. So to change ball flight, changing the club head is the easiest fix.

Figure 8 shows the relative heights of the Centre of Gravity (COG) for a deep-faced and a shallower-faced driver. Either way, we need to hit the ball below its own COG to get it airborne. The lower the clubs COG is, versus that of the ball, the higher the ball will launch. The further back from the face the head’s COG is, will also promote a higher launch. Add to that the fact that the driver’s face is not a uniform loft, and is indeed a radiused face this too has an effect called the vertical gearing- effect. In play, this means there is more loft at the top half than at the bottom, as shown in Figure 9 , which also affects flight.

So again, just looking at the stamped loft on a club head does not show you the full nature of the beast, but armed with these simple ideas when looking down rows of shiny new drivers you can calculate which to dismiss straight off and which to consider more astutely and how important your teeing up height might be in your set-up.

If you have access to impact decals or some talc powder, you can calculate where on the face of the club you are hitting the ball. If the impact marks are all over the place, then the chances are your club is too long. Trying shortening the shaft and seeing if you can tighten up the impact hits, and this will improve shot length. To keep the shaft grip in the same place get a rubber band and put it on the grip for consistency’s sake. If they are still wayward across the face, then look at “head design”, maybe try a larger, deeper face, which helps with stability at impact.

No matter how large the head is, the sweet spot is still only a pin head in size, but the peripheral-weighted heads are much more forgiving on off-centre hits generally. Yet a well-hit 265cc head will go just as far as a nailed 450cc head when the ball has found the sweet spot, but mis-hits are fewer with the 450cc head, for sure.

So, given all of the aforementioned ideas, you can now “calculate” your game on your own golf course, with or without a club fitter on a range with demo clubs. You should see a real difference, if you will just try this basic method of employing real numbers from your own “real” game, leaving the guesswork and the ego at home. Then, later, do go see a good fitter, and with his help fine-tune to your potential, as he will be able to help both with heads and shafts to make your game the best that it can be.