Brianbigoats
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length of the shaft and with more travel time in the air more thing can happen the smallest miss hit can become a big miss plus most people try to over power it
The Driver. Most forgiving yet hardest to hit? or are there other reasons?
I'm guilty of always trying to optimize my drives even mid round. Small adjustments to ball height and position, body position and swing changes. So many little things to remember also when standing over the tee. Doesn't help when I've had great results out of different combinations of these.
Wicked Cool Bearded Man
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holy crap - blu continues to be a genius. Really insightful wording here.
Yup. I was guilty of this for awhile. I've had some consistency issues with driver, but that became the club where I really started steeling myself to develop a routine of how I tee it up, aim, take my grip, stance, and swing. Am I now a rocket launcher? No. But my shot group is definitely tighter since I became routine oriented.
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. Not saying if i disagree or not but this is where some will argue the point. I too have felt similar. The logic as you point out would be that the longer the club the more room for the ball to carry further off track. The logic- an unintentional slight hook with a 5iron should not land you as much trouble as that same slight hook with the driver since the 5i may be traveling only 180yrds vs the driver traveling 250yrds. I can certainly relate to that but the argument to that would be that a mishit which causes that hook to head off track is more forgiving with the driver even though its longer. To me that argument is basically saying that the same swing flaw with the same off center hit will stay much more on line with the driver even though the cluib is longer simply because its much more tollorable or "forgiving" to that same strike.
Quite honestly I am just not sure if that extra forgiveness does indeed overcome the isue the extra distance creates with that same mishit. Some would say it does. Of course i think many mishit the driver much worse due to reasons mentioned but if the mishit is the same or very similar mishit one experiences with a 5iron (or whatever shorter club) then this is where the argument is made whether or not the driver will still offer a better result even though its longer due to the fact that it absorbs that similar mishit so much better.
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While a driver club face is larger and has a larger sweet spot, it also has pretty large areas that can penalize you if you use those areas to make contact with the ball. It's the subject of gear effect. If you want to hit a draw, but always make contact towards the heel, you are battling yourself.
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I think your viewing that sort of bacwards. Its the latger sweetspot and the large areas outside the sweetspot that is actually allowing for the mishit to be much mess "penalizing" towards a poor shot vs smaller clubs. That would basically be the argument of why its considered the most forgiving club in the first place.
Absolutely. My friends laugh at my penchant for drawing full-swings with my PW. The wedge puts a ton more back-spin on the ball yet it will still curve. And that's even with a solid strike.
So it stands to reason that the much more vertical face of a driver would offer less side-spin correction through back-spin. I do believe the higher lofted, higher spinning drivers impart less side-spin than lower lofted drivers, equally equipped. But the difference would very rarely save one from a bad swing, imo.
jochan90
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Rollin, it sounds like you are looking at forgiveness as a way of directional correction. I believe the reality is, with the driver being more forgiving, when you take a bad swing and hit off center, the forgiveness of the club allows for faster ball speeds. Just because the head is bigger doesn't mean it's going to square its-self at impact.
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Agreed. And the added size of the face makes the gear effect much more prominent in woods - especially the driver - than irons.
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No club is going to sqaure itself of course. All I'm saying is what the argument of greater forgiveness with a driver would be. Hit a ball off center and also with too much in/out and you will have a certain result with a shorter club such as a 5iron but the similar miss with the driver would not be as detrimantal. That is simply the logic implied. The forgiveness of the club I dont think is just for ball speed. It also relates to being able to better handle the similar mishit for left and right and overall ball flight. bsically keeping it straighter or better put, not as errant. Would be the same theory with larger GI irons vs smaller blades. Simply put they are more forgiving for the same relative mishit. Allows one to be much less than perfect yet offer results not as detrimental to the overall ball flight. This is why (for better players) they are considered less workable just the same as a driver is considered by many to be less workable than a 3w.
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Well to an extent a driver will try to, and is the reason why the club face is buldged. It has to do with the center of gravity being further back in the head than in fairways/hybrids/irons. This causes the driver club face to rotate one way or the other at impact depending on how far from the center you strike with.
The CG of irons is immediately behind the face, so they are not affected in the same way or to the same extent. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but you have to understand it in order to use it with your driver (not that you have to or need to).
The other argument I was making can be better shown in pictures:
While the sweet spot is big on the driver because the club face is big, there is still more non-sweet spot (anti-sweet spot?) area on a driver club face when compared to an iron promoting similar technology. And that sweet spot is more sole to crown on a driver face, versus heel to toe on an iron. So in the case of this particular driver, a hit on the extreme heel or toe is going to impart a lot of spin from the gear effect while also causing a big drop in ball speed. An extreme hit on the heel or toe of the speedblade shown below will impart little to no spin from gear effect, but is designed to still give you decent ball speed and ultimately distance. This is based on all things being equal in misses between the two.
Bstubbs42
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The drivers of today are much easier to hit, I quit playing golf in 2002 and was at the time still playing a Tony Pena Persimmon driver. When I came back to the game in 2013 I obviously needed to upgrade all my equipment. I used to hit the old persimmon pretty well, at least I thought I did but length wise it was 220 to 240 max distance at best. The new drivers are so much easier to hit problem is they are too long, most stock driver lengths are 45.5 to 46" which is to long for most people. I use a driver that is 44.5" and I find it much easier to control and I like hitting it a lot more than a 3 wood. I just replaced my 3 wood with a 16* SLDR Mini which I am using off the tee on shorter holes. This is working much better for me than a 3 wood but I never hit a 3 wood off the deck, mental block for me I guess I will stick to hitting my hybrid off the deck, again a shorter club and easier to control.
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Without copying your whole post, and what a very good informative post it is
I can get a decent grasp for the characteristics of the clubs and the info in the post. But I cant quite seem to gather up whether or not (the original topic of this thread) is the driver the most forgiving head in the club line up?
From what I see above for a similar mishit =
Driver - more spin but much less speed/distance
iron - less spin but more speed/distance
Driver - helps a tad to square the club
D- Helping to square of course mean better
D- More spin also means more errant but yet less speed means cant go to far off anyway
I- Less spin would mean less errant but more speed means more distance to carry it in the off line direction.
I- But then the iron doesn't go as far as driver on the whole anyway
Which one in the end is actually the most forgiving for an unintended yet similar swing flaw and strike?
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All things being equal, I'm not sure technically either one is more forgiving than the other.
I would like to think the driver is compared to a smaller player style iron due to a lack of perimeter weighting and distance technology in the iron.
I don't think either would win out when compared to a game improvement iron (again, with swing/miss being equal).
Other advances like low forward CG with high loft may give the driver an edge as well. But I don't know how much it has been studied for comparison in regards to ease of use or forgiveness.
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interesting answer and topic imo
No skillz
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I agree completely with JB on this. My playing partner (who taught me to play 3 yrs ago - still working at it) is a 2 handicap and always told me that the driver has the biggest hitting surface of any club I had - and that I needed every bit of it!! Now the tee-box is the strongest part of my game. Now I need to develop some touch. That seems to be much more difficult!
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There are a WHOLE lot of people that study this stuff left and right and design clubs for a living that will dispute that. In fact one of them (and he was part of the R&D that brought this out) is in a THP TV video explaining it.
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I may have misunderstood the video, but I thought he was just talking about super low-forward cg without discussing loft? Isn't that the counter-argument from the other side, that super low-forward cg is less forgiving, but that forgiveness could be found with it using the correct loft?
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In my opinion the loft is necessary, not forgiveness correcting. Missing the sweet spot does not necessarily result in change in performance with more loft.
golfinFF
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Most struggle with driver cause they play the wrong loft as well as swing it differently than a 7i.
Once I learned to not over swing the driver my tee game changed immediately.
Once I learned to not over swing the driver my tee game changed immediately.