KNOW YOUR IQ – THE NEW FT-iQ DRIVER
The longest, straightest driver we’ve ever made
Shop Callaway's latest and most technologically advanced driver, the FT-iQ. Click Here!

This fall, Callaway Golf launched a true breakthrough in modern driver technology, the FT-iQ Driver. It’s the longest, straightest driver the Company has ever produced. Callaway Golf Magazine told you the story behind this technological marvel in the Winter 2008 issue; here we share a bit more information about the design philosophy and why Callaway Golf engineers believe this is the smartest driver ever. We asked Dr. Alan Hocknell, Callaway Golf Vice President of Innovation and Advanced Design, some of your burning questions. Want to learn more? Visit the product pages at www.callawaygolf.com/FTiQ.

What’s so smart about it? The FT-iQ Driver represents the best technologies we have up to this point, all combined into one driver. It includes Complete Inertial Design, where all design and performance variables have been considered all together, as one, to produce the most balanced, highest performing driver possible. So we’re not sacrificing or chasing one design benefit at the expense of another. The process is intensive, and it is aided by the design space made available by using Fusion Technology. Ultimately, each material in the head is chosen for a specific purpose and blended together following the principles of Complete Inertial Design. The results are truly something special.

Is it longer or straighter? Based on robot testing measuring hits across multiple face locations, it’s the longest driver Callaway Golf has ever made, and it is also the straightest, thanks to Fusion Technology, external rear weighting and the new Hyperbolic face cup. Past Callaway Golf driver faces used a Variable Face Thickness (VFT) pattern. The advantages of the elliptical VFT face design were most notable in the era of unlimited Coefficient of Restitution, or COR. With driver conformity testing changing to Characteristic Time (CT) testing, our design goal is to make the center of the face confirm to the CT limit and make the rest of the face as efficient as possible during impact.

What’s a Hyperbolic face cup and why do I need it? Using mathematics and engineering, we re-optimized our face thickness pattern to result in something that resembles a mathematical hyperbola that’s thicker in the center and thinner toward the edges, achieving off-center performance at minimum face weight. The re-optimizing process used hundreds of dynamic finite elements simulations of impact on the face to iteratively arrive at a face design, which achieved our goals. For the first time, we have been able to make sufficient titanium casting process improvements to incorporate the hyperbolic thickness pattern into a cast face cup design. This allows the greater ball speed benefits of the hyperbolic thickness pattern to be added to the high moment of inertia in the Fusion Technology body. The combination of a high efficiency face and a stable body is capable of producing the highest off-center ball speeds we have ever developed.

What do the pros think of this driver? We’ve had excellent feedback. It’s late in the season, and pros are often reluctant to make an equipment change mid-season, but several players wanted to put the club in their bag straight away! Of course, it was early in production and we were still going through the USGA and R&A CT testing process; that’s since been completed and the club is within the CT limits. But just to give you an example, I believe some of Rocco Mediate’s first words on hitting this driver were “Holy moley!” He loved the sound, the look, the distance and the trajectory. And when Ernie Els hit it, he said “Wow.” Then he asked when he could put it in his bag. He said: “You guys give me these new toys, I want to use them!”