Here’s how Francesco Molinari decides what goes in his bag

Three months ago, 2018 Open Championship winner Francesco Molinari announced his new equipment deal with Callaway. Since then, he’s won once and notched two other top-five finishes.

As he prepares to take on the final two majors of the season, Molinari offered some insight into the work that goes in to making sure his clubs and specs are in top shape.

The decision-making, he said, comes down to trial and error, and astute observation.

“We started working on shafts,” Molinari said of his time with Callaway senior Tour rep Johnny Thompson, “and the thought was that I needed a little bit more spin, to keep control of the ball flight and shape the ball, especially to the left, a little bit better.”

Said Thompson: “Until you get in game-time situations, that’s when you really start to figure out what equipment does for you. [Molinari] played the Callaway equipment in Maui, so by the time he got to Bay Hill he had had two events and we had an idea of what we were going to do.”

Molinari’s club optimization started with his driver, 3-wood and hybrid.

“We changed his [Epic] Flash Sub Zero driver setup as well as his Flash 3-wood and Apex hybrid,” Thompson said. “All three of those clubs were just hanging a little right on him and he wanted them to be a little bit easier to draw.

“For the woods, it was a simple as just changing the shaft and going to a softer profile which helped him square the face up and release it easier and pretty much see a ball that starts straight and falls left as opposed to starts straight and goes right. You just wish everybody had a golf swing like his, that is so repeatable, because fitting is so easy.”

Molinari won the Bay Hill Invitational the week the official Callaway announcement was made, and contended in the Masters a few weeks later.

“Once you like the feel of the clubhead, then it’s about finding the right loft, face angle and shaft,” Molinari said. “It’s a process. Little by little you find something. You take it out on the course and maybe you see that it’s not quite there yet and you go back fine-tune it again. Any kind of advantage you can get, you really want to get.”

Check out the rest of Molinari’s bag here.

To receive GOLF’s all-new newsletters, subscribe for free here.