Pro V1 performance... at half the price?

Can the new mail order balls really compete with a Titleist? We found out

Mail order golf balls weren’t even a thing five years ago. Back then your choice of premium tour-level balls boiled down to the traditional major brands – Titleist, Taylormade, Callaway and Srixon. All brands who’d like you to believe tourlevel balls need to be played on tour to be considered validated.

But there’s new ball upstarts out there like Vice and Snell Golf, who think a bit differently. Both spotted the huge potential in premium tour golf balls and a significant gap in how balls are sold to golfers.

Each developed their own ball, but without the overheads of marketing a ball on tour – player deals, advertising – it means they can sell a premium tour ball for half the cost of the market leader, Titleist’s Pro V1.

Our recent “best sub-£30 golf ball test” highlighted the Vice Pro as a cracking ball, but could a ball with such a low price tag – £20 a dozen cheaper – really compete against the No.1 ball in golf? It only seemed fair to put the latest mail order golf balls up against the market leader and find out.

HOW WE DID IT

We invited the leading mail order golf ball brands – Vice, Snell and Pearl – to send us their best tour balls, and we bought a dozen Titleist Pro V1 and Prov1x to test them against. We got our pro to hit each ball with a driver, 7- iron and wedge so we could gauge the difference between long, mid and short game performance, all while our launch monitor watched on. Once each ball had been hit with each club we analysed the data alongside our test pro’s comments to come up with our conclusions.