Fastest clubs of 2017

If you’re looking for more speed, here’s 45 new clubs that deliver it

The 45 clubs that yielded the biggest ball speeds for our tester.

Jailbreak bars, speed slots, cup faces, inverted cones, turbulators… Today’s new clubs are rammed to the rafters with tech to help you hit it further.

The examples above are just five of the innovations currently featuring in drivers, woods and irons on sale now; there are many more. But they all have one thing in common – they improve ball speed from your sweetest strikes and they preserve ball speed when you don’t hit it out of the middle (ie most of the time!).

Equipment editor Simon Daddow, a former club designer, says: “Preserving ball speed is the holy grail of club design, which is why so much technology is now engineered to do exactly that. So whether you hit it towards the toe or heel, or high or low on the face, the ball still gets out there and you don’t lose too much distance.

“The numbers here are the fastest ball speeds generated by our test pro Chris Ryan, who has hit every club on sale this year. It’s worth noting the fastest ball speeds don’t necessarily equate to the longest shots; if it’s combined with too much or too little spin, shots don’t launch at the optimum angle or hit the perfect peak height to maximise carry distance or runout. So we would not go on a blinkered search for extra ball speed alone. But what this does give is a great idea of how closely the top clubs are matched, and how fast a ball speed golfers can generate with each club category.” l All this data is from our Top Gear test earlier this year (so we’ve not included the latest Ping G400 launches or Callaway Epic irons), where we used a controlled indoor environment along with constant golf ball temperature and a different launch monitor to other club tests in this issue.