ULTIMATE REVIEW! - PING K15 DRIVER

[Tony Covey MGS]

ULTIMATE REVIEW! - PING K15 Driver

Just about every golfer who has ever been fitted for a club, whether he knows it or not, was almost certainly in part fit using the process PING pioneered nearly 40 years ago. In recent years, with the birth of the fitting cart, and tools like Mizuno's shaft optimizer, other OEMs have raised the stakes, and built upon PING's foundation, but to this day, PINGs color code system remains the gold standard for length and lie fitting. Of course, it's not like PING has been resting on their laurels since 1972 either. Their newish nFlight system, which among other things includes gapping analysis, is arguably the most sophisticated fitting tool in the industry today.

While it's easy to get caught up in the fitting, that's not the reason we're here. This is, after all a review of the PING K15 Driver. Released in the fall of last year, the K15 rounds out PING's “15 series”, which also includes the G15 and I15. Though it hardly seems possible, the K15 is engineered to be even more forgiving than the G15. According to PING, the all titanium K15 offers golfers a high trajectory ball flight with low to medium spin.

 

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[Matt Saternus]

Great review. This has definitely been a winner in lots of fittings, but it does love to go left. The concept of "straight biased" cracked me up from the first time I saw it.

[Xamilo]

Great review.

 

I can't understand why people still think reviews in MGS are always biased. ITs great to have a REAL comment on a driver and not just an "every driver is absolutely awesome" type of review.

[Moecat]

Unless I'm mistaken, the K15 may be the driver reviewed by MGS that has the most disparity between actual distance and accuracy numbers vs. perceived distance and accuracy.

[Tony Covey MGS]

Unless I'm mistaken, the K15 may be the driver reviewed by MGS that has the most disparity between actual distance and accuracy numbers vs. perceived distance and accuracy.

 

It's tough to say for certain. After we reviewed the Cobra S2 Forged, and the Mizuno JPX-800 irons we discovered a couple of areas where we could improve the way scores are calculated. Those changes were implemented in advance of the PING review (which I personally consider the first of our 2011 series). The scoring protocols are now locked in stone so anything we do moving forward can be comfortably compared head to head.

 

With respect to the actual disparity. Yeah...I think this one is going to be tough to beat. Most curious is that when it comes to distance, more often than not it goes the other way - our testers don't hit the club on average, nearly as far as they think they do.

 

My best guess is that we're dealing with a case of human nature at its worst. The K15 produces similar results for all "decent contact" swings (toss out stuff off the crown, or hit with a wide open face, etc.). What generally happens with our tests is that the golfer will hit one or two balls that are significantly longer than the rest (I guy who "averages" 240 will get a hold of 1 or 2 that go 265). Those are the shots people remember, and so the perception is often that the couple, two, three bombs they hit are reflective of their average distance. In reality, the average is often substantially less than the longest drive hit (which is why we love our charts). My thinking is to an extent, the consistency of the K15 eliminated those stand out shots, so people perceived that it isn't as long as other drivers, when in fact, it may prove to be more so.

 

You can see what I'm talking about here on our Interactive Data Page. With very few exceptions (clear mis-hits, and possibly our senior level tester), the shot dispersion in terms of distance, is narrow. As far as actual distance is concerned, without respect for left/right deviation from center, nearly every testers shots are very tightly clustered. Based on the testing we've done thus far, this result is incredibly unique.