Presenting – 2013 “Golf’s Most Wanted” Driver Test

A New Standard (because you deserve better)

It’s time for a new Gold Standard in club testing.

For years golfers have looked to a certain list to provide guidance for their new club purchases, but as the game has changed and new technologies have emerged, the List has remained the same.

Rather than show the actual data that proves one club out performs another, they coddle the golf companies (also their advertisers and #1 source of revenue), and award points for style (looks, sound, and feel), the arbitrary notion of innovation (it’s only innovative if it actually works), and even throw in a few bonus points for effective advertising (they call it buzz). And when all is said and done, everybody gets a medal.

You deserve better.

That type of thinking that’s turning us into a nation of spoiled pansies who expect to be rewarded just for showing up. Sorry Sally, when performance is the only thing that matters, you don’t need to run your club test like a 3rd grade Science fair. Not everybody gets a trophy.

At MyGolfSpy our club testing is Datacratic. We don’t care about names. We care about performance – and performance only. The best drivers in golf are determined based on the data, and not a damn thing more.

Meet the Participants

Declined to Participate

The following companies were invited, but declined to participate in the driver test:

Testing Procedures:

:: Testers were given adequate time to warm up.

:: Golfers hit between 5 and 15 shots (5 at a time) with a given club during each session.

:: Clubs for each session as well as the order in which they were hit were selected at random.

:: Each tester hit each club in our test on 3 different occasions (3 different days).

:: While individual numbers varied, each tester hit the same number of qualifying shots (non-misreads, solid contact) with each club in the test.

Scoring:

:: Launch Monitor misreads and gross mishits were dropped prior to scoring

:: Based on Total Driving (Point that results from Distance minus yards offline), proprietary formulas are used to trim outliers. From the remaining shots we determined individual scores for Distance, Accuracy, and Total Driving.

:: Each individual tester’s score is relative to his own performance with each club tested. One tester’s distance and accuracy is never compared to another’s.

:: For example, when we calculate our distance scores, our slowest swing speed tester (~200 yard average), is never directly compared to our highest swing speed player (~290 average). Both scores are relative only to each’s individual ability.

:: The same is true of accuracy. For example, an average of 20 yards offline might be very good for for one tester, and yet comparatively poor for another. Our scores always reflect differences in individual ability.

:: Scoring this way prevents any single tester…the guy who might be measurably longer than everyone else, or more accurate than everybody else, from exerting an unfair amount of influence over the final score.

:: The distance, accuracy, and overall (Most Wanted Driver in Golf) are determined based on the average score of the top 5 testers (the lowest score is always dropped to prevent a single poor performance from skewing the results).

Golf’s Most Wanted Driver Results (Schedule)

We will begin publishing the results of the 2013 Driver Test next week.

:: Monday 4/15 we’ll cover distance. For guys looking for the longest driver in golf, these are the results you must see.
:: Tuesday 4/16 we’ll cover accuracy. Want to hit the ball straighter and play from the short grass more often? These are the clubs that can help you do that.
:: Wednesday 4/17 we’ll reveal Golf’s Most Wanted Driver; the club that our data says is the very best of 2013. And as we always do, we’re going to PUBLISH the DATA.

The following week we will be publishing testing notes, behind the scenes info…that sort of thing. The data is the data, and we believe strongly in that….but there are always details that can’t be seen with a simple yardage number and score, so we’re going so share some of the more interesting insights and notes from our test.

Finally, we’re going to provide mailbag links to allow all of you to ask whatever it is you’d like to ask about our test, the testers, the clubs, etc. Depending on volume we may not answer everything, but we are definitely looking forward to the opportunity to fill in any information you feel like we may have missed.