When TaylorMade-sponsored golfers Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, and Tiger Woods begin their first rounds at the Masters today, they will be carrying drivers intentionally manufactured to be illegal when they leave the factory floor.
The clubs in their bags, however, have all now been finely tuned to be within the sport’s limits. Most drivers are made to be just shy of the rule prohibiting an elasticity rating higher than a .83 COR (coefficient of restitution). Because of inherent deviations in the manufacturing process, designing for the maximum carries risk of exceeding it slightly.
With its new M5 and M6 line of metalwoods, TaylorMade aimed just beyond that limit, and then adjusted each club back down into the legal range. Every driver is scanned, the data is run through a proprietary algorithm on the cloud, and then resin is injected into two red ports to make the tweak.
“Now what we’re doing is to have our initial target that is illegal,” said Chandler Carr, the product manager for product creation at TaylorMade. “We start off with a driver that goes beyond the rules of golf. We start off with a driver that is too fast for the game, and then we tune every single head uniquely and in multiple locations.”
The net result is to eliminate minor fluctuations in the manufacturing process by fine-tuning the drivers in a post-production step. (TaylorMade says that injection proves unnecessary in 0.3 percent of clubs.)
“We’re at the point where we really eliminate tolerance altogether, and now we can have our target basically be at the limit whereas before we had to artificially make the club a little bit slower just to make sure that every head was legal,” Carr said.
This resin-injecting step applies for all M5 and M6 drivers, not just those ticketed for the elite players. According to Carr, TaylorMade seeks to provide all its golfers, whether Tour pros or hobbyists, with the same clubs.
“Essentially every customer that buys a new driver now is playing the speed lottery,” Carr said. “If you buy one of our drivers, you in theory win the lottery every time.”
The M5 has two movable 10-gram weights and a 12-setting hosel (the socket on the club’s head where the shaft inserts). The latter can shift preferred loft by two degrees in either direction while the former helps customize the weight distribution, changing the way the ball spins and draws or fades. There are more than 21,000 possible permutations in all, meaning the driver can be almost as fine-tuned every week as a stock car on the NASCAR circuit.
“You’re really doing it on a week-to-week basis depending on where you’re playing, what kind of fairways you’re playing on, how important it actually is to hit a fairway if they’re really narrow,” said Jory Mendes, TaylorMade’s global communications manager.
The M6 is less adjustable than the M5 and more of a natural fit for less competitive golfers. The club head uses light carbon composite panels to redistribute 46 grams of weight lower and farther back to help increase loft and reduce spin—creating a more forgiving shot.
“When the engineers have any kind of weight that they can save, they’re extremely happy,” Mendes said.
This evolution in driver technology follows the introduction last year of TwistFace, which lowered a club face’s loft on the toe and increased the loft on the heel. That change was intended to correct for common hook and slice errors and act like de facto bowling-lane bumpers.