The ‘awkward’ reason Rory McIlroy has been tinkering with equipment setup

It’s no surprise that when you have the prodigious length of someone like Rory McIlroy, driver can get taken out of your hands more often than you’d like.

McIlroy has been trying to do something about this season.

McIlroy, two starts after winning at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am earlier this season, made wholesale changes to the top of his golf bag last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. McIlroy added new TaylorMade Qi35 woods, intent on solving a unique problem he faces: Some holes get “awkward” as he calls it with the distances he hits it.

But almost quickly as he inserted the new gear, it was gone by Sunday. His old Qi10 woods returned to the bag — in part thanks to Uber. McIlroy admitted he may have rushed putting them into play for a number of different reasons.

“You’re always looking for a little edge, and for me it was like, Okay, if I can find something [in a 3-wood] that goes 300, that would be great,” he said Tuesday ahead of this week’s Players Championship. “Not just for what’s coming— for a lot of golf courses we go to nowadays, it seems like fairways pinch in at like 310, 320, which is just awkward enough for me to hit driver. But then if I hit 3-wood 285, 290, I feel like I’m not quite pushing it up there as far as I can.”

Basically, McIlroy’s previous Qi10 isn’t quite as hot as the new Qi35 one. With McIlroy’s length, he’s often forced to hit less than driver more often than his fellow competitors. So if a fairway gets narrow at 320 yards, which still allows other players to hit driver out there 300 yards, McIlroy has to hit a 3-wood that maxes out at 290 because his driver would get in trouble at 320.

That puts him at a relative disadvantage compared to his opponents, solely due to the advantage McIlroy has on them on every other hole.

It’s a bit of a confusing problem to wrap around for most mortal humans, but still a good one to have. Wouldn’t we all like to hit our drivers too far?

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With the new Qi35 setup, McIlroy was able to get the 300-yard 3-wood carry he desired, but that also meant three other changes. He had to add a strengthened 5-wood to narrow the gap between it and the 3-wood and then add a 3-iron to fill the expanded gap between the 5-wood and his 4-iron.

That would have put him at 15 clubs, but because he went to a spinnier ball in TaylorMade TP5 earlier this season, he felt more comfortable hitting knockdowns and half shots with his pitching wedge and 9-iron, meaning he could weaken the PW slightly while removing his 50-degree wedge.

He also got a little bit more distance out of the Qi35 driver. But when he couldn’t find too many fairways at Bay Hill last week, and actually lost strokes off-the-tee in round 3, he went back to the Qi10 wood setup. In a cascading effect, the rest of the bag had to revert back too.

On Sunday at Bay Hill, McIlroy also said he wanted to get into the new gear, but it’s not always a simple process, especially in the day of 12-month gear cycles.

“Some years you vibe with a new piece of equipment a little easier,” he said. “Like that Qi10 that I’m using that they brought out last year, it was like love at first sight. I was like, this thing is amazing. I think when you feel like that about a golf club, it’s very hard to change into something else.

“Look, they’re all businesses and they’re all trying to make money and innovate and try to be better. So I understand why the cycle is the way it is.”

Drivers

Asked if he ever feels pressured to switch into new gear for the sake of switching into new gear, McIlroy was blunt.

“No, never. No,” he said.

That tracks as sponsors and their Tour reps are on the same team as the player. They want a player to be best equipped to win. When they see a player is attached to a piece of gear, they usually tend to let them cook.

TaylorMade has a couple such examples on their staff, such as Collin Morikawa playing his trusty SIM driver for five years until this season, and continuing to play the same generation SIM Ti fairway wood. Tiger Woods still uses a TaylorMade M3 5-wood from 2018.

McIlroy again confirmed he likely will keep the Qi10 setup through the Masters, but he seems intent on trying to get those new Qi35 woods in the bag shortly afterward. He was obviously dialed with them on the range and in practice, but it’s just another example of how the pressure of real competition can change things, even for the World’s No. 2 golfer.

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