What does it mean?

Whacking a driver down the center of the fairway is just about one of the best feelings in golf. There’s nothing like going to pick up your tee knowing that you’ve hit your Sunday best and received the plaudits from your playing partners.

One of the reasons we’re able to pull off such cracking shots is because of the technology packed into these clubs – as well as our unwavering natural ability! – that is getting honed and enhanced with each generation that passes.

Broadly speaking, drivers are made of three components: the grip, shaft, and clubhead. We’re all too familiar with how our favourite driver feels and performs, but have you ever wondered how the inner workings of the club help us achieve the results we’re after? Please read on as we dissect PING’s latest G430 drivers to give you this wonderful insight.

The range

First of all, there are four drivers in the G430 range. You may not know anything about them at a glance but they all have distinct names, the Max, the SFT, the LST, and the High Launch.

The G430 Max driver will help you improve your ball striking consistency and give you more speed off the tee. This driver has customisable weight options so you can shift the center of gravity between a draw and draw bias.

The acronym in the G430 SFT driver stands for ‘Straight Flight Technology’. As the name implies this is a great option if your swing suffers from a slice and you have a hard time finding the fairway.

It may sound very similar to the SFT model, but the G430 LST driver stands for ‘Low Spin Technology’. This club will help you get the distance you need if you have a high swing speed. This driver has also been designed to help you if you’re looking to hit the ball with more consistency.

If you have a slower swing speed, the G430 High Launch driver will best accommodate your game. It’s very light and easy to swing so you’ll be able to build up momentum and get lots of power into your strike.

The face

The face is naturally the part of the driver that makes contact with the ball. It’s important you make the best contact possible, so PING have designed the face of the G430 to have a shallow variable-thickness pattern. This essentially means that the face is incredibly responsive when you make contact with the ball, resulting in you generating some impressive ball speeds to get lots of distance down the fairway.

The crown and toe

PING have made a really solid driver here, and while the face is a big contributing factor, so is the body of the clubhead. PING’s own “Carbonfly Wrap” crown wraps over the crown and into the heel and toe, this really makes the club feel like a solid unit when you use it. This lightweight crown not only saves weight so the driver feels easy to swing, it also lowers the “CG” (centre of gravity) to help give you more ball speed and a higher MOI.

MOI means ‘moment of inertia’. This is basically a measurement of how much resistance the club has to rotating at the moment of impact. If you had a low MOI, your club face would be prone to hitting the ball with the clubface more open or closed, and the more likely you’d be to hitting a ball offline. Therefore, the club having a high MOI means it has lots of resistance to twisting on impact.

It can only help your game to have better a better knowledge of how your club’s work. But while it’s great to know the theory, we all know that practice makes perfect. You can always contact us if you’d like to book in a lesson to help you get better at your game.