TOUR INSIGHT: BOB MACINTYRE
Taylormade tour fitter Mark Thistleton looks at the driver characteristics of one of the game’s most exciting young talents, Robert Macintyre
We managed to get pretty much every one of our players except Bob into the Stealth for the start of the 2022 season, so it was a great challenge getting the Stealth set up to give him even more off the tee. You can’t make a driver that pleases absolutely everyone on tour, but we still converted our highest number of players ever into Stealth, testament to its appeal for a wide range of players. Tour pros are still like us in the sense that they’re golf fans, they like golf equipment and they want to see and try new clubs for themselves. It’s just that some take more fitting sessions than others to find the optimum set-up in a new head.
The reason for Bob taking a bit longer to switch was fairly simple – he loved his SIM2 and was overachieving in the driving statistics relative to his world ranking at the time. Driving has always been one of the stronger parts of his game and he was using a driver he was very, very happy with.
He turned up to the fitting for Stealth and said, “My driver is the best club in my bag. You guys are going to have to work really hard to get me to change!” From my point of view, this was a great challenge. One of the great parts of our job is to optimise the new product and show players where the benefits lie for their games.
We found an opportunity to get him into the Stealth when he’d had a below-average week with his old driver during the Middle East swing. He’d also seen all of the other players on tour switch into Stealth, so perhaps part of him was wondering what he was missing out on and was therefore keen to give it a go.
He’s very specific with what he likes to see from his driver. One of the most important things for Bob is a very penetrating ball flight as he struggles a bit with creating too much spin. His shaft and lofts are all geared towards creating the right ball flight for him and keeping spin down. He likes to see a little draw and he likes to launch it around the 11-11.5˚ window with about 2,200-2,300rpm of spin. If we can keep his bad ones to around 2,800rpm of spin that’s good, too, because he won’t lose his shots so far to the left.
Every quarter of a degree matters in Bob’s driver so we have to cherry-pick heads that keep it in that perfect spin window. We’ve done a bit of tinkering since that initial fitting to stop him losing a few drives to the left, but he’s certainly settled into his Stealth Plus now and feels at ease with it on the course.
Overall, Bob has really improved over the last few years at optimising his driver numbers and has worked hard to increase ball and clubhead speed through his work in the gym. Obviously a driver can’t do everything for you so he’s gone away and improved his technique massively since he turned pro. Nine swings out of ten he’s hitting this gorgeous, penetrating draw with his driver and has now got the confidence to take it out on any hole on any course because he can back his swing. We saw that confidence in practice when he played Dustin Johnson at the WGC Matchplay last year. He regularly took driver on the reachable par 4s and turned Johnson’s strengths against him.