TaylorMade Qi4D Drivers and Fairway Metals

TaylorMade developed its all-new Qi4D drivers and woods with three things in mind; gaining more speed, building the most fittable driver and creating something that the best players in the world were excited to use.

In 2025, TaylorMade saw Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and other ambassadors play previous model drivers and fairway woods. With Qi4D, the TaylorMade engineers focused on design aspects and performance notes that would fit the every-day golfer, but would also show the best players in the world the results they’re looking for.

“I think the true test of this is I think you’re going to see Scottie in it, Rory in it, Tommy (Fleetwood), the top three players in the world are in TaylorMade products. They’re not in it because we just pay them, but they’re in it because we make them better and this product is making all of them better, too,” Director of Product Creation, Andrew Oldknow, said. “It took Scottie six swings to say this is better than my driver, Rory was four and Tommy was one session. Immediately all three of them are in the new product; it’s a true test.

“It’s just, this is a better product than we’ve ever created in our history.”

TaylorMade re-engineered the head profile to increase ball speed, improved roll radius for consistent spin, brought a new manufacturing processes for consistency within the product and developed a new shaft and fitting process to bring a holistic approach to improving their own driver.

The results spoke for themselves and led the company to the Qi4D driver in what is an exciting launch for TaylorMade.

Shaft profiles and fitting

A big part of the Qi4D story is the REAX shafts and fitting process that TaylorMade has developed. Working with Mitsubishi Chemicals, TaylorMade is bringing three shaft models to market with blue, red and white REAX shafts designed to analyze rotation.

What TaylorMade found was they could take video of a player’s swing and depending on their rotation rate, where they got the club directly in line with their lead arm, they could determine the rotation profile and the type of shaft they would need.

The blue shafts are for mid-rotation, red for high-rotation and white for low-rotation golfers. The thought behind the fitting and shaft process is that fitters will be able to more easily line up golfers with the right shaft to help increase speed, distance and accuracy while getting more centered contact.

New and improved face for distance

TaylorMade is in its fifth generation of the carbon face and has used over 11 million shots captured over 20 plus years to identify needs and must haves with their face performance. With over 60 layers of carbon intertwined, the Qi4D driver features a new roll radius, which makes for more consistent spin across vertical impact locations.

TaylorMade had found inconsistencies in drivers across companies when it came to the roll radius. Roll refers to bulge and roll, which is a club face geometry working against the gear effect at impact.

When a club makes impact with the ball, gear effect causes twisting depending on where the ball hits on the face. Bulge, which is a curvature from heel-to-toe, and roll, which is curvature from the sole to the crown, helps negate that effect and give you straighter shots and less spin loss.

With inconsistencies across roll, that would mean golfers would get different results with different drivers. So, TaylorMade changed its manufacturing process to ensure identical roll radii in every driver.

In addition to the shaping, Qi4D has 60x Carbon Twist Face, which gave the engineers weight savings and more ball speeds.

“We’re getting more and more speed each year off the face and we’re increasing the area on the face where we’re getting more CR (coefficient of restitution). So, Qi35, I think we averaged about 48 percent of the face and now we’re almost 53 percent,” Oldknow said. “Which just means you get more area of the face that has more potential to give you speed. Because there’s such fine layers (of carbon), we can really make these micro adjustments.”

Adjusted manufacturing process

To ensure some of the consistency aspects and ball speed gains, TaylorMade had to reconfigure how it was manufacturing clubs and who was involved. The staff was separated into teams with very specific goals to focus on.

One team focused on aerodynamics, one on the bulge and roll, one with spin rates and so on, to give each team the opportunity to perfect their aspect of the driver.

In addition to segmenting divisions, TaylorMade changed how it creates their drivers to automate the process, thus providing more consistency across the board and eliminating human error.

“The consistency story isn’t the sexiest, but when you think about the way we’re manufacturing the driver, there’s no human hands prepping any of the materials anymore. So, the face is coming out of a machine, the crown is coming out of a machine, all these parts are coming out of a machine,” Oldknow said. “The most important part of it, the carbon fiber faces come out of a tool. They’re milled to perimeter weight shape and then bonded into the face.”

That benefits the consumer to have the same face and head dimensions that they were fitted into. The consistency along with the new aerodynamic shape have given TaylorMade the results they were hoping for when it comes to Qi4D.

That starts with the core model, Qi4D, that has a re-engineered head profile for increased ball speed to help the golfer gain more distance. The core model will likely fit the most golfers as it was developed with speed and forgiveness in mind with four adjustable weights to change trajectory based on needs.

The Qi4D LS model is the low spin version that also has the re-engineered aerodynamics, but with a more traditional shape based on feedback from Tour players. The LS model has two adjustable weights in the front and back with a 15-gram and four-gram weight.

The Max model is a lighter weight, high launch, mid-spin driver with more forgiveness than the core model. The Max is TaylorMade’s first modern non-titanium driver as the collar has been forged out of aircraft-grade 7075 aluminum. It features a new, oversize head shape that helps with stability and forgiveness.

It is constructed with two adjustable weights in 13-grams and four-grams and has maximum MOI without compromising clubhead speed. The Max Lite model is an even lighter version of the Max driver for golfers with slower swing speeds looking to gain clubhead speed and distance.

No matter which model you fit into, TaylorMade believes this driver will continue to push the company forward in being a leader in drivers and fairway metals. Having the Tour adoption is the icing on the cake, seeing the top players in the world using the latest iteration is evidence of the work that the brand put in to create this version of its driver.

“This is like our unicorn driver where we’ve been spending all these years trying to figure out how to make things go fast and consistent,” Oldknow said. “This is a year where I think we put it all together.”