How The Kingdom at The Grove fitting increased my driver distance

Introduction

The TaylorMade Qi4D driver arrived with plenty of hype, but even more attention after Rory McIlroy put it in play during his Masters victory. TaylorMade has just opened their doors to a brand new facility – The Kingdom at The Grove – where you can get a full customised fitting just like the pros would. Nicola Slater took a visit to see what the experience is really like and whether the Qi4D lives up to it’s name…

Keywords

TaylorMade, ball speed, carry, QI4D, launch, distance

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What I found

In terms of performance, ball speed is where the Qi4D truly shines. As mentioned I’ve found that moving from playing a lot my speed has dropped. I used to see numbers pushing 140mph but recently it’s been more around the 130/131mph mark so you can imagine my delight to see an average of 137mph with the Qi4D.

I really saw the full benefits of the custom fitting from TaylorMade, being able to tell the fitter my tendencies and what I want to see in my game. The changing of weights even helped me gain a couple of mph on club speed something that I’ve been very conscious about. With the Titleist GTS that I tested only the day before my clubhead speed was down at an average of 88.8mph since so jumping to 92.5mph was very positive.

Key benefits	Downsides
Ball Speed– The QI4D is hot off the face. Ball speed was consistently much higher than I’ve been seeing recently.
Adjustable – as well as being able to change loft you can adjust the weights in the head to help with shot shaping or to help with swing weighing.
Mis-hits – Mis strikes didn’t seem to drop too much so there’s a lot of forgiveness across the face
Tour-inspired looks – compact head shaping will appeal to a lot of golfers.

TaylorMade QI4D Data Table | Source: NCG

As you can see from the data my angle of attack is quite high. This was actually higher believe it or not in the fitting but by reducing the weight in the back of the head my fitter said I would not feel the need to hit so much on the up. This actually then resulted in a drop in spin rate. So, on the Trackman data shown above the spin averaged at a very respectable 2356RPM. Launch angle also dropped from before so I was getting more forwards than up motion which is exactly what I was after.