Welcome to the 2016 Driver CG Advanced Data page. For those looking to take a deeper dive into our CG Data we wanted to provide you with this additional resource that offers 3 features above and beyond our Standard Edition.
- It’s bigger. Pretty straight-forward…we wanted to give you a little bit more virtual real estate in which to play.
- It has some things you requested. In addition to our standard charts, we’ve included CG XY (face-on view), and for our CG YZ and CG Na/MOI charts, we’ve also included our 2015 measurements. Basically, you can compare this year’s drivers to last’s.
- We wanted to try something new and interesting…just a bit more info to think about, I suppose.
To that end we’ve created a 2016 Driver CG Story Book. The book contains 5 tabs which you can move between using simple click navigation. It’s 2016…you guys know how this stuff works. We’ve leveraged the same, Club, Manufacturer, and Model filters from our main charts. Where applicable, we’ve also included a Year filter which allows you to show or hide drivers from both 2015 and 2016.
Here’s a breakdown of the individual tabs
Tab 1 – CG YZ (Top/Bottom and Front/Back CG location relative to Face Center) with 2015 Drivers included.
Tab 2 – CG Na & MOI with 2015 Drivers included.
Tab 3 – CG XY (Face-On View). Sorry this one is 2016 drivers only. You guys requested this view, and the data is certainly interesting, but it also comes with a disclaimer of sorts. This is not a straight-forward measurement. For example, we mind find drivers with similar XY CG locations, yet very different face heights, face shapes, crown curvatures, bulge and roll radii, etc.. XY CG similarities aside, those other design considerations might cause the clubs to play quite differently from one another. So while I suppose this chart could give you some indicator of draw or fade bias, the CG NA and MOI chart should prove to be a much better indicator of total performance.
Tab 4 – WHAT IF? Normalized CG Data. No two drivers are quite the same, and as you figured out from our loft chart, actual loft is seldom what we’re told it is. That’s important because, as we discussed, loft is also a critical element of CG Na. With those particular details almost always being unequal, there’s always a bit of an apples to oranges …or at least Red Delicious to Granny Smith aspect to the data.
So as a think piece of sorts we normalized the data such that we can ask the question, what would CG Na look like if everything was actually 10°?
The rule of thumb for our chart is that if a driver’s actual loft is below 10° CG Na goes up. If it’s above 10° it goes down. Since most of the drivers measured have actual lofts not far from 10° we don’t see a ton of movement. Only when the actual loft is substantially lower (Cobra KING LTD Pro and Bombtech Grenade) did we see appreciable jumps. We don’t know what Bombtech’s target loft is, and we’re all but positive you’ll never find a LTD Pro with 10° of actual loft, so this represents a fantasy land of sorts. Nevertheless, it’s sometimes interesting to see a real apples to apples comparison – even when those apples don’t actually exist in the real world.
If nothing else, it gives you a working example of how loft impacts CG Na.
Tab 5 – Loft, Lie & Head Weight. For your reference (and mostly so you don’t need to click back), we’ve included the Loft, Lie, and Head Weight chart from the main post.
Things to Consider
Frankly, we don’t want to tell you what to take away from all of this. You’re on the Advanced Data Page, you’ve already proven you can think for yourself.
That said, the three things I think are worth digging into and considering further are:
- Which companies have evolved the CG philosophies, or have introduced alternative products that actually compliment pre-existing offerings?
- What general trends do you see? Is the industry moving in a specific direction?
- Who do you see as the industry leaders? Who is lagging behind?
Thanks for checking-out the data, and by all means, let us know if there’s anything else you’d like to see (Leave a Comment in the Main Post).
