With its G440 line, PING was on a mission to increase speed overall without sacrificing forgiveness.
Operating under constraints from the USGA in how hot the face can be and the amount of forgiveness makes it a challenge to continue to innovate. So, PING’s engineers went to work in figuring out how to modify what was an already successful club in G430 to get more club speed, more distance and even more forgiveness.
“We took a pretty drastic approach to look at where can we save mass in areas of the golf club that might not really be helping performance. We know that low (center of gravity) is great and we’ve hung our hats on putting it as low as possible and as far back as possible,” PING’s Design Engineering Manager, Travis Milleman, said. “So, we looked at areas, front of the golf club, high and forward; where do we have a ton of mass? Right around our hosel.”
That implored PING’s engineers to dissect the trajectory sleeve, it’s purpose, it’s mass and what it would look like if they removed it altogether. The sleeve doesn’t technically functionally hold the hosel and it makes up quite a bit of weight in steel and titanium in the heel region.
PING created prototypes to see how much of that mass they could take away and what the benefits would be.
“Taking it away saves, on the driver, around five grams of mass, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but in the design world, five grams is massive. Especially on a driver,” Milleman said. “In an area of the club that is functionally not a great place to put mass, it saves mass. What we were able to do with that is lower it and put it as far back as we possibly can.”
In turn, the free hosel design in the G440 line was born and the engineers were able to move mass to where it could help with center of gravity and MOI.
The hosel sleeve structure supported some of the face in the previous models, so removing that in G440 driver also allowed for the face to flex more than previous generations.
Combining that with a thinner face and shorter face height, PING knew it was on to something in creating more speed and faster clubs.
“We made a little bit of a face height reduction, so we went a little shorter on the face, which allows us to go thinner. So, the CT reading will be the same, but we know in all of our studies and researches that going shorter and thinner is actually better for ball speed even if the CT reads the same,” Milleman said.
Reducing the face height built in more structure for the driver to allow for the thinner face. Milleman compares it to a pencil, if you have a long pencil, it’s easier to snap. If you have a short pencil, it is more difficult to break, even if it’s the same material.
The team also removed mass in the crown by moving all three driver models to a carbon fly wrap and moved the mass lower in the club. Part of the weight savings from materials and the hosel was then utilized in the back weight as the center of gravity shifter, to repurpose the weight as something beneficial to the golfer.
PING took the 25-gram back weight in the G430 and made it a 29-gram back weight in the G440.
“Our estimation is every gram you can dd to where we put our CG shifter is an extra percent of MOI over without having that gram,” Milleman said. “We’re definitely trying to optimize putting more mass in our back weights.”
The functional changes in the clubs, shifting weights and moving center of gravity throughout the club has given PING a lighter and faster system overall. That translates to more distance and more forgiveness for the golfer without changing the integrity of the clubs PING is producing.
“I think G440 is a great example, on the driver specifically, we have a very forgiving trio of clubs, but how do we get faster? I think it’s great to show 15 percent MOI, that’s great and that’s going to be great for consumers,” Milleman said. “In all of our studies, high MOI is always better than lower MOI. But, looking at how do we get more speed has been our frontier as long as I’ve been here.
“We’re always trying to get faster and trying to find ways to maximize MOI and get faster.”
