Driver fitting judged on the bad swings, not the best one
Your longest drive of the session is entertainment. What decides whether a driver is right for you is the shape of your misses, the ceiling on your spin, and how steeply the ball comes down at the far end. That is what we optimise for.
It is the easiest club in the bag to fit badly and look good doing it
Give any golfer sixteen swings with an unfamiliar driver and at least one will come off the middle with a favourable delivery. Read the average of the best five and every candidate on the rack looks like an upgrade. This is not deception, it is just what happens when a small, self-selected sample gets treated as representative.
We take the opposite approach. The acceptance rule is stated before your first recorded strike, applied to your current driver first, and applied identically to every candidate. The discard count for each candidate is printed on your sheet. A head that produced twelve accepted strikes from sixteen and one that produced seven are telling you two very different stories even if their averages match.
The consequence is that our sessions sometimes end with "your current driver is fine, change the shaft" or occasionally "your current driver is fine, change nothing". Both of those are worse outcomes for our revenue and better outcomes for your golf.
Ninety minutes, four variables, one at a time
1. Head
Model and centre-of-gravity position first, with the shaft held constant. Includes previous-generation heads, which are frequently the better and cheaper answer.
2. Shaft
Weight first, then bend profile, then flex. The weight step alone accounts for most of the improvement in a typical driver session.
3. Length
Almost always shorter than the 45.75 inches a stock driver ships at. Strike location improves and the speed loss is usually smaller than the strike gain.
4. Setting
Loft sleeve and moveable weight last, once the head and shaft are settled. Adjusting these first obscures everything underneath.
| What you notice on the course | What the capture usually shows | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Ball balloons into any headwind | Spin ceiling above 3,400 rpm on mishits | Heavier or lower-launching shaft profile, sometimes less loft |
| Big right miss under pressure | Face-to-path opening as tempo increases | Heavier shaft, shorter length, occasionally more upright lie |
| Low, hard hooks | Strike consistently toward the heel | Shorter length and a different head CG position |
| Distance loss with no obvious cause | Strike scattered low on the face | Length and shaft weight, then loft setting |
| Ball runs out of fairways | Descent angle under 35 degrees | More spin, not less — usually a lighter tip section |
| Feels uncontrollable but numbers look fine | Wide swing-weight or frequency mismatch | Build change only, no new head required |
What a February driver session can and cannot tell you
It can tell you your delivery characteristics with high confidence: club path, face angle, strike location, ball speed, launch and spin are all measured directly by one unit or the other, and the two get cross-checked against each other on every strike.
It cannot tell you your April carry distance from direct observation, because carry is simulated indoors regardless of who is running the session or what equipment they own. What we can do is state the simulation's inputs, apply a published temperature and pressure adjustment, and print both the raw and adjusted figures so nothing is concealed.
Between May and September you can book a 45-minute outdoor confirmation block at a partner range and re-run the same clubs. Golfers who do this generally find the adjusted numbers land close. We keep those comparisons because they are how we check our own model, and the interesting ones end up in the notebook.