PXG Lightning Tour, Tour Mid, Max-10K+, Lightning Max Lite drivers

Gear: PXG Lightning Tour, Tour Mid, Max-10K+, Lightning Max Lite drivers

Price: $649

Specs: Carbon fiber crown and sole plate with titanium face, movable weights and adjustable hosel.

Who it’s for: Golfers looking for more ball speed without giving up launch, spin, or forgiveness, and players who benefit from precise fitting options across four head shapes.

What you should know: The four drivers in the Lightning family are each designed around a new concept called Frequency Tuning that stiffens the sole to help the heads generate more ball speed, while repositioned moveable weights help golfers achieve their desired shot shape.

The Deep Dive: Engineers who design drivers have always struggled with a paradox. Golfers want more distance and more forgiveness, but boosting one often results in sacrificing the other. However, PXG’s Lightning family adds a new variable to the equation by harnessing what happens in the microsecond after the face begins to deform. In that tiny amount of time, as the head starts to vibrate, they discovered an opportunity.

All four Lightning drivers feature large carbon fiber crowns, hosels that allow players and fitters to increase or decrease the loft, and an ultra-thin titanium face that is designed to flex over a large area. The bottom of each club is also covered by a large carbon fiber sole panel. Those are things that golfers have seen before, but players will also notice a seam in the sole panel that extends from the front to the back of the. That spine is not there to make the club look faster while it rests in your bag. It’s there to stiffen the head and tune it like an instrument.

After researching previous drivers, PXG engineers realized that the vibrations created at impact were out of phase with the vibrations that naturally were produced by the chassis of the club, and they knew that if they could stiffen the head and get those vibrations to be in phase with each other, the driver would perform better. The spin in the sole allowed them to achieve that by stiffening the bottom of the club without added weight.

The result, according to PXG, is that each of the Lightning drivers transfers more energy back into the ball, so they can deliver more speed and more distance for every type of player.

But while every golfer wants more speed and distance off the tee, needs vary broadly based on a player’s skill level and skill. So, PXG designed four different Lightning drivers and each head’s performance slightly overlaps with at least one other model, so players and fitters will have options when they work to find the ideal combination of speed, spin and launch.

Lightning Tour (8, 9,10.5 degrees; 9 degrees LH): Designed for accomplished, fast-swinging players, this is the lowest-spinning, lowest-launching of the four Lightning drivers. The Tour features three adjustable weight ports, with two in the front and one in the back of the head, and comes standard with two 7.5-gram weights, a 2.5-gram weight to allow players and fitters to create either a draw or fade bias, or with the 7.5-gram weight in the back, slightly boost the spin rate and launch angle. While the Tour has the lowest combined MOI of the four Lightning drivers, it has a deeper face, and skilled players should be able to shape shots with it more easily.

Lightning Tour Mid (8, 9, 10.5 degrees; 9, 10.5 degrees LH): This version is designed for golfers who need more forgiveness, more spin and a higher launch angle that the Tour provides, but who still want enhanced ball speed. The Tour Mid comes standard with one 15-gram and two 2.5-gram weights, so the center of gravity (CG) location can be shifted more toward the heel, toe or back of the head than it can be in the Tour.

Lightning Max-10K+ (9, 10.5, 12 degrees): If forgiveness is the most important thing you want in a new driver, this is your club. The Max-10K+ has the highest combined moment of inertia (MOI) in the Lightning family, so it will resist twisting on off-center hits more effectively and should be the straightest driver in the group. Unlike most 10K drivers, the Lightning Max-10K+ has adjustability, coming standard with a 15-gram and two 2.5-gram weights. It also produces more spin and a higher launch than the Tour Mid.

Lightning Max Lite (10.5, 11.5 degrees): This driver is designed for golfers who struggle to generate clubhead speed and who need to maximize carry distance. It is 14 grams lighter than the other Lightning drivers and only has one weight, a 12.5-gram weight in a port that is located in the back of the head.

If Black Ops was the company’s breakthrough, Lightning is its refinement — a set of drivers designed to improve speed by understanding what happens during the smallest fraction of the swing, and built to give fitters all the tools they need to make that speed work for more players.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: PXG Lightning drivers speed forgiveness fitting options