PING G440 K Driver

PING has already seen a ton of success with its G440 line of drivers and metals and the brand is now adding another driver model to the lineup.

The G440 K driver is PING’s highest-MOI adjustable driver and fits in with the company’s objective to optimize their drivers through a total system approach. Through center of gravity, weight savings and years of research, PING believes its engineers were able to achieve a high MOI driver without sacrificing speed.

“I think one of the big variables for us is, especially from a PING standpoint, we’ve always been a brand that’s been known for forgiveness and we really want to push the ability to have an extremely forgiving driver that’s also really fast,” PING’s Director of Product Development, Ryan Stokke, said. “And when you can do that well, you really deliver a very unique and differentiated product outcome to the end consumer that leads to just really high game enjoyment, their ability to maximize their distance off the tee and ultimately lead to their ability to shoot lower scores.”

The G440 K driver shares all the same principles of the other G440 drivers, with a free-hosel design to save weight near the heel, a longer shaft system and a package designed to bring speed.

Combing those aspects with a dual carbonfly wrap that helped PING save weight for lower, deeper center of gravity, allowed the engineers to optimize launch and spin. The G440K also features a moveable 32-gram rear weight and a fast and forgiving face for more ball speed.

The genesis for this design was centered around the idea for PING to not sacrifice speed when it brings a forgiving driver to the market. The engineers wanted to bring speed, but without making it difficult to control.

“If you have to hit it perfectly in order to achieve (peak ball speeds) relative to what is going to be your typical impact pattern, it might be unattainable to see very high ball speed,” Stokke said. “It’s difficult to repeat that in a driver, so if you look at what we’re studying and trying to focus on is how can we maximize both the ball speed potential, but also the consistency of launch and spin conditions whether you hit perfectly in the center or around the face?”

The research and development team conducted studies on what that inflection point was to maximize the outcome with both speed and forgiveness without making it unattainable for the average golfer.

Stokke said the team looked at several tools to help analyze distance and accuracy and where the two peak together. They look at the sensitivity of gaining distance while losing dispersion. Where does the trade-off start to penalize the golfer?

“If you can hit it five yards farther, but now 50 percent of the time you’re in the rough relative to the fairway, we actually do a scoring and a weighting to figure out that penalty. It’s similar to how strokes gained is doing that,” Stokke said. “And we do this through our Proving Grounds testing and we can actually look at that in a club-A versus club-B type comparison to give an appropriate weight to the finding on if you’ve gained that distance, is it actually measurably better for a potential that you see a little bit less accuracy.”

PING will have golfers test their gamer driver, then fit into a G440 driver and look at the standard deviation of their offline shots relative to the distance gain. They then use a comparison tool to suggest if it’s a benefit or a detriment.

The research and development team knows that golfers are going to benefit from higher MOI, but now it’s maximizing the speed with that high MOI to give golfers the best of both worlds. They’ve done it through that optimization process, though, which is different than maximizing the MOI for the sake of saying it’s at the USGA regulated maximum that they are able to reach.

“A couple of our designs through G430 and into G440, we’ve actually slightly lowered the measured MOI, but we’ve achieved an actually much more optimal center of gravity location,” Stokke said. “That then leads to a tighter dispersion on the golf course, because relative to where the impact is occurring, we’re getting a more efficient utilization of energy transfer, ball speed consistency that overcomes the slight decrease in MOI.”

With the G440 K driver, PING has been able to push MOI higher for the golfer that is going to have a bigger miss tendency. By lowering and optimizing the center of gravity, PING was able to enhance straighter ball flight with the G440K driver in a way that acts like MOI.

In effect, that is helping the golfer to add distance in the form of consistency when it comes to off-center strikes.

“We see that we’ve been working with a lot of Tour players right now with the rollout of the G440K driver and that’s one of their primary things that they’re coming back to us as they go,” Stokke said. “Even when they do mishit, their spin consistency, their launch angle consistency along with the ball speed preservation leads to basically the same performance that they see from their best shots relative to their more typical miss pattern.”

The G440 K driver is a culmination of exploring the optimization of speed and forgiveness. Through a multitude of testing, PING has developed a fast and forgiving driver that brings all the premium aspects of the G440 lineup.

No longer does a high MOI driver have to sacrifice distance and PING is proving that with the all-new G440 K.

“I think the big thing for us when we talk about speed is we want it to translate to helping somebody hit it farther. We really want to optimize ball speed, launch, spin, straight ball flight and dispersion,” Stokke said. “Our goal is to really just help people play their best. I’ve yet to play rounds of golf where I still feel like there’s golfers out there that have the game full figured out, especially off the tee.”