Get More Distance

by Frank Thomas

When a golf ball is launched from a club, it follows a trajectory dictated by its speed, launch angle and spin rate. While this is true for all clubs, the discussion properly centers around the driver: With most other clubs, we're concerned about distance control, while with the driver we usually just want to get as much distance as we can. (The three-wood is also a distance club, but when the ball is on the ground we don't have the same options as when we can place it on a tee.) So the question every golfer wants answered is; ‘How can I get the maximum distance -- overall distance, not just carry – out of my tee shots?'To begin with, consider the ball. In the 19 th century, golfers noticed that their solid gutta-percha golf balls went further after they'd been used for a while and acquired some nicks and scrapes. This observation is the reason golf balls have dimples today. Those dimples create a roughened surface, which has significant effects on a ball in flight. Where a dimpled ball will travel 260 yards the smooth ball will only go about 130 yards.

First, dimples reduce the "drag" or resistance on the ball when it's traveling through the air. This is not intuitive because generally, smooth things travel through air and water better than rough things. This would be true even for a golf ball, if it were traveling at speeds less than about 50 mph. But in any normal trajectory off a driver, the ball is traveling considerably faster than 50 mph. before it hits the ground. The reason for this reduced drag is complex, but conceptually it is similar to going through a force barrier. The barrier is broken at a specific speed because the size of the turbulent air tail is reduced in size, and the resistance is cut almost in half.

In addition to reducing drag, dimples create a turbulent layer around the ball so that when it spins – and every golf shot hit in the air has backspin – it drags the air over the ball, creating lower air pressure on the top of the ball than on the bottom producing a lift force greater than the weight of the ball. This allows the ball to glide, rather than to take on the trajectory of a bullet, in the same way that an aircraft wing provides a lift force to get and keep the plane airborne.
So now that we know that dimples and spin are key factors in determining distance along with ball speed and launch angle, how can we optimize these factors to get maximum distance?

After 400 years of trial-and-error experimentation, along came computer analysis of trajectories using aerodynamic properties of spinning balls to help answer the question. It has now been shown that to get maximum distance out of all the club head speed that most of us can muster – around 90 mph without having to tighten our shoe laces – we need to launch the ball higher than we originally thought. The optimal launch angle for that swing speed is between 13 and 14 degrees. Our three wood will often do this better than the driver, and as a result we sometimes find that we actually hit the ball farther with our 3-wood than with the less-lofted driver, which doesn't make sense.Unfortunately, because the length of the three wood shaft is less than the driver and its loft is higher, that club does not project the ball with as much speed AND will cause a higher spin rate. How can we take advantage of the driver's additional length and lower loft to maximize our distance with what should be our longest club?

Our goal with the driver should be to increase its loft to launch the ball at 13 to 14 degrees, while also lowering the spin rate to about 3,000 rpm. We can accomplish this with the aid of the latest generation of big titanium drivers. Most all of them are good clubs and have the trampoline effect which lowers the spin rate so the choice of brand name is almost entirely a matter of personal preference.

Since the driver is the one club in which we are actually swinging up at the ball at impact, we don't have to create all of that 13-to-14 degrees of launch angle with the club face. The loft of the club should be about 10.5 or 11 degrees, or possibly more as your swing speed goes down. To help create the optimal spin rate of about 3,000 rpm we should:

In other words:
Hit it high and let it fly