The Golf Student

Drivers are a crazy golf club. A standard, modern driver is 460cc you can find them in several different sizes but the standard as I have seen it is 460cc. For now we can just talk about that size, we can define the following for now.

Cc – This is defined as cubic centimeters. It is a measurement of volume essentially how much “stuff” can fit in a “container”, in this case air inside of a sealed hollow mixed metal shell. I have seen some other blogs that defined CC as cubic container, I doubt it stands for that but I can easily be corrected.
460 – The size, 460 is the largest legal size in Golf right now. Other common sizes include 400, 375, 350 etc.

Now there are more attributes to a golf driver like shape, loft angle, flex, shafts, grips oh my, but for now we can discuss what I have learned about the club head size. I have heard that the larger the head the heavier it is, this is not necessarily true. I once heard at a store that the principle of the larger head is like a heavy bowling ball. Build up the momentum and the pendulum action will smack the golf ball harder thus propelling it farther from what I have seen and researched this is not always true either. Consider that the metal or composite material of a driver head is incredibly diverse and can be very light. Most of the club heads are made of a mix of some titanium (lightweight, very strong, not very brittle, and very very expensive as raw material and to manufacture) and composite aluminum at the rear and top of the golf club. Let me stay on track here, the size of the club head. So why would a player want the largest club you can get? There are several reasons that I have read about.

1) The larger the golf club the higher the “bounce” or “faceflex”. Consider a trampoline and a person. If you have a larger trampoline, the spring will propel the person high. If you use an exercise trampoline that is much smaller you will not go so high. Why? The trampoline will exert more spring back onto the person the larger the face of the trampoline. Same as the head of a club. Thus a larger golf club should give you more distance.

2) It is pretty simple logic that the larger the club face the more space you have to hit a ball. This would mean that the “sweet spot” is larger as well. The sweet spot is simply the best place to hit a ball on a surface. There are sweet spots in tennis, baseball, etc . So the larger the sweet spot the less of a chance to hit the ball less effectively.

Much more on what I have learned about golf drivers in the future, but hopefully this helps a little.