If you’ve been playing with a non-conforming Takomo Ignis D1 driver that past few months, relief is on the way.
Takomo tells us it’s shipping free replacements to customers who purchased the original Ignis.
“We’re doing a quiet launch,” Takomo Chief Marketing Officer Sean McCullum tells MyGolfSpy. “We’re making sure the thousands of customers that purchased this thing assuming it was conforming are taken care of.”
Takomo is shipping those replacement driver heads – the Ignis D2 – free of charge.
Why is Takomo doing this? For that, we’re going to take a quick trip back to April.
Why was the Takomo Ingis D1 deemed non-conforming?
In mid-April, customers who had purchased the original Takomo Ignis D1 driver started receiving notifications from the company that the R&A (Takomo is headquartered in Finland) found it to be non-conforming in certain specific weight configurations.
“Yeah, the R&A slapped us on the wrist,” explains McCullum. “It was a big growing pains story for Takomo.”
The original Ignis D1 came with three weight ports. Takomo delivered the driver with two three-gram weights and one 13-gram weight installed. There was also an extra eight-gram weight in the box. If you moved the 13-gram weight to the heel, put the eight-gram weight in the toe and put a three-gram weight in the rear, some drivers would break the CT limit.
Some. Not all.
“We had a couple thousand of these out in the market when we got the news,” McCullum says. “We’re like, ‘son of a bitch!’ We didn’t test that part. It was a huge amateur hour, growing pain issue for us.
“So we said let’s slap ourselves in the face and fix this for our customers.”
The new Takomo Ignis D2 driver
The new Ignis D2 is not yet listed on Takomo’s website (it’s expected within the next month or so) but the entire first run is going out to Ignis D1 customers.
“We’re pretty happy with the new product,” says McCullum. “We’ve gone a little bit more towards forgiveness and we’ve cleaned up the sound and feel.”
The new design is definitely a forgiveness play. The Ignis D2 features only one weight port in the back end of the head and the driver comes with swappable three- and eight-gram weights.
“The face and loft adjustments stay the same but we’ve added more rigidity to the crown,” McCullum adds. “We’ve seen a 10 percent increase in MOI over the Ignis D1, while also fixing the sound issue.”
Takomo did send D2 prototypes to the R&A for testing well ahead of time and received word that they would be conforming. The shift to more forgiveness generally takes pushing CT limits off the table.
What does the USGA have to say?
Essentially, nothing.
The R&A and USGA operate, for the most part, under the same set of equipment rules. Conformance with one is conformance with the other (just don’t try playing a pre-1990 set of PING Eye 2 irons in a UK competition).
The fact that the original Ignis D1 went on sale before getting a final R&A blessing shouldn’t be a surprise. R&A/USGA approval isn’t mandatory to make or sell golf equipment and neither organization automatically tests clubs or balls. Manufacturers formally submit their products for conformity testing although some smaller direct-to-consumer brands don’t always apply right away. Some will skip the process entirely if they’re not targeting competitive play.
For its part, Takomo’s internal testing showed the D1 was conforming but the company admits it didn’t test that one specific (not to mention odd) weight configuration. That’s the one that proved problematic from a CT standpoint but only in some of the driver heads tested. It wasn’t all of them.
That points to slight inconsistencies in manufacturing tolerances which isn’t unusual for smaller DTC brands. One of the things you pay for with mainstream OEMs is tighter tolerances and more consistent manufacturing. That’s also why DTC drivers tend to lean more toward forgiving and less toward ball speed. Maximizing CT is one thing. Manufacturing to that maximum while staying within the limits is quite another.
MyGolfSpy wants to know
Takomo players, have you received for Ignis D2 head yet? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.
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