Recapturing a Magic Feeling With the New Ping G430 Driver
There is really only one thing I’m looking for in a hot new driver.
Youth.
Jagger says you can’t always get what you want. Truth. But I can still find a fleeting glimpse of youth in the right driver. The one thing I don’t want to ever give up, the one thing I’ve got to have in a driver is that feeling.
You know the one. It’s the feeling of the ball jumping off the clubface. It’s a soft/hard feel, the same kind of magic I got years ago from hitting a home run in baseball when I caught a pitch so flush on the bat barrel I almost didn’t feel it at all. The baseball cleared the fence so quickly and easily it was nothing short of a marvel.
Finding a driver that does that for me—an aging golfer waging an annual battle against losing distance with every club in the bag (well, maybe not the putter)—is Step One in my perfect driver search. There is no Step Two.
Enter Ping’s new G430 driver, the next-generation model after the popular Ping G425. The first time I got my hands on a G430 was at the recent Pittsburgh Golf Show in Monroeville, Pa. It’s one of those traveling regional golf shows where area hackers with cabin fever show up in mid-winter to look at what’s new in equipment, wheel-and-deal in used clubs, listen to club pros offering swing tips and consider new gutter-guards for their eaves. (The home improvement folks must kill it at these golf shows or they wouldn’t be there, I guess.)
Courtesy Ping
I was practically a door-buster at the 10 o’clock Sunday morning opening and went right to the hitting bays, where patrons could pound a small bucket of balls into netting about 20 yards away. I paid five bucks for some balls and the guy running it, an assistant pro or clubfitter of some kind, gave me a second bucket because I was the first customer of the day. Lucky me. An assortment of demo clubs were on hand.
I grabbed the Ping G430 and asked him what he thought. “Great club, it really goes,” he said. “Just don’t look down at it.”
What, you don’t like the way it looks, I asked? “Nahh,” he replied, joking that maybe I should put a bag over the clubhead before using.
I disagreed. The G430 has six raised ridgelines on its crown, called "Turbulators" to improve aerodynamics and increase swing speed. They almost resemble mini-torpedoes. I like the distinctive design, it makes the driver look more powerful, even mean. As always, beauty is in the eye of the customer and the customer—ahem, me—is always right.
I went over to the mats, got loose and starting hitting balls with a Ping G430, 10.5-degree loft. That cracking sound on the first two swings was me. Suggestion: Try not to get old. It took only three more swings to clear my aforementioned Step One. Then I repeated it time after time. You can’t learn much from hitting a ball into a net but you can get the feel. It felt like I was crushing drives. The Ping G430 had that elusive home-run feel I require.
I contacted an expert to make sure I wasn’t delusional. He is Joe Corsi, a good lefthanded player about my age. We both qualified and played in the same U.S. Senior Amateur a few years back. He runs Corsi’s Golf in Greensburg, in Arnold Palmer country a few miles from Latrobe, Palmer’s birthplace. Corsi is an approved Ping clubfitter who sells all brands of clubs in his shop. He knows just about everything worth knowing regarding shafts, lofts, heads, grips. Whatever Joe says about equipment is gold, in my opinion.
He confirmed that I was not delusional. At least not about the Ping G430.
Corsi told me how he fitted a good area player we both know with a G430. Let’s call him Billy (not his real name, so as not to imply an endorsement). Billy had been hitting a Ping G425 driver and Corsi’s launch monitor had him solidly carrying his tee shots 305 yards with ball speeds between 175-180 mph.
“I thought he had too low a loft so I put him in a 10.5-degree G430 with a Fujikura Black shaft so the launch angle would go up but still keep the spin down,” Corsi said. “He immediately began carrying it 330 to 340 in the air. He was blown away. Part of it, though, was that he didn’t have a great fit on the 425 driver.”
Corsi got his first look at the G430 last October when he was part of two foursomes of Ping clubfitters invited to Victoria National, a sweet course in Newburgh, Ind. He played with John K. Solheim the third-generation Solheim who leads Ping. “He had the G430 and he was just mashing it,” Corsi said. “The first time I hit the 430, there was an instant 'wow' factor.”
Upon further testing, Corsi got the numbers to back up his "wow" factor. He’d been using a different brand driver with an AutoFlex shaft, a magical-mystery South Korean shaft that I wrote about for SI.com two years ago, that produced 6 to 8 mph more ball speed than his Ping G425 driver. With his new G430, his ball speed got very close to the AutoFlex shafted-driver.
“There was a definite jump from the 425,” Corsi said. “I think the 430 is hotter. It’s been really good. It’s the first time in a while that Ping focused on ball speed instead of just accuracy. Ping has always focused on forgiveness. Now they’ve caught up in distance.”
I consulted another expert online, Ian Fraser, the founder of TXG (Tour Experience Golf), based in the Toronto area. Fraser and his crew expertly test clubs and offer unbiased video reviews on YouTube.com. A recent episode featured Fraser trying to decide which driver he would use in 2023. He had it narrowed down to two models, a Titleist TSi3 and a Ping G430 Max.
Spoiler alert. It was a close contest, the launch monitor numbers had it neck-and-neck, but the Ping G430 got the nod because Fraser’s off-center hits were better and in a tighter dispersion pattern with the G430.
“The good ones are almost exactly as good,” Fraser concluded. “I just know what I’m getting with the Ping is more forgiveness. I’ve been hitting this driver on way straighter lines.”
Some details on the G430:
> The titanium face is 6% thinner than the G425.
> The driver face has optimal curvature, notably lower in the face to reduce spin (which explains why several of Fraser’s low-center strikes in the TXG video still turned out so well).
> The hosel is adjustable to eight different ball-flight positions, which Ping calls "Trajectory Tuning."
> A 25-gram backweight is adjustable to Draw (anti-slice); Neutral; and Fade (anti-hook).
> The G430 driver produces a better, lower, more satisfying sound at impact than the G425, which some players thought sounded too high-pitched.
> The G430 is available in four models: MAX, the most stable and forgiving model for most players; HL (High Launch), with a lighter shaft and head for slower-swing players; SFT (draw bias for golfers who fight a slice); LST (less spin and slightly lower ball flight for better, high clubhead speed players).
> Manufacturer suggested retail price: starting at $600.