Korda's latest win came with a new driver in the bag. Only this wasn't a simple plug-and-play.
In the hyper-fickle world of professional golf gear, Nelly Korda was an outlier. For two seasons, she leaned on the same TaylorMade Qi10 Max driver; for nearly eight years, she refused to budge from a specific compact, pear-shaped head profile that fit her eye.
When you’ve captured 15 LPGA titles and two major championships with a specific look and feel, the "if it ain't broke" mantra usually wins out.
For elite players, a driver's shape isn't about vanity — it’s about shot-shaping. In Korda's case, it was finding something that not only checked the looks box, but also possessed the ability to turn the ball over on command.
For the first time in two years, Korda was able to clear both hurdles with a different driver in the bag after extensive testing with TaylorMade's Qi4D.
During the testing phase, Korda found the Qi4D’s footprint gave her the confidence to turn it over with ease.
"The most important thing is the comfort I have over the ball when I look down," Korda noted. "After that, it's just if it performs the way I want to."
The performance shift was immediate. By utilizing the four movable weights in the head, tour reps migrated mass toward the back heel to induce a draw. To match her swing patterns, the adjutable sleeve was moved into an upright setting, along with more loft, for lie angle and launch purposes. (The internal weighting bias effectively assists the face in closing at impact, making this the most "draw-biased" setup Korda has played in her professional career.)
While the shape helped nudge her in the direction of Qi4D, the ball speed gains made the decision permanent. In early testing sessions, Korda saw an immediate 3 mph uptick in ball speed — a number that's rarely seen at the professional level with highly optimized builds.
On the range at her home course, she was reportedly carrying bunkers that had served as landmarks for her "limit" for years. But speed without a tight miss is a liability. For Korda, the win wasn't just peak velocity but the stability of the spin rates. Strikes from out of the geometric center recorded roughly 2,400-2,500 RPMs, while misses saw spin increase to 2,600 RPMs.
In recent years, equipment manufacturers have worked to corral spin on mishits, in an attempt to make heel or toe strikes perform like a "good ball." For Korda, the 100 RPM delta meant her misses weren't ballooning or falling out of the sky; they were staying in the same air-space as her flushed shots.
The final piece of the build was a departure from her previous shaft profile. Using an R&D recommendation system that analyzes swing delivery — specifically how the shaft deflects at the bottom of the arc — Korda was fit into Graphite Design Tour AD FI 6-S.
The "FI" profile features a slightly stiffer tip section than her previous gamer, adding rigidity at the bottom of the swing to help stabilize the head through impact.
Korda’s 16th career win in her first start with the new stick at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions suggests that sometimes, even the most ingrained habits are worth breaking for the right set of numbers.
Category: General Sports
