ROBO REPORT
Why Sweeping Your Woods Isn’t Always Best Our latest robot test reveals how attack angle affects distance
in the longer clubs BY JONATHAN WALL
It’s a swing tip that has been handed down through generations: Sweep your woods
how much it’s spinning, or whether the attack angle they’ve grooved over years of practice is helping or hurting them. For this test, we used Ping’s most recent fairway woods (G440), hybrids (G440), utility iron (iDi) and long iron (G440) on the swing robot at two differ- ent swing speeds (85 and 95 miles per hour). We also tested two attack angles (neutral – or level to the ground – and 3 degrees downwards) to determine how clubhead delivery at impact affects launch, spin and carry. Our most dramatic finding belongs to the higher-lofted fairway woods. The 9-wood spun at 6 300 rpm with a neutral attack angle – a spin rate that sounds reasonable for a club designed to launch it high and stop it fast. When we moved to a descending blow, the spin rate dropped to 5 835 rpm and carry dis- tance jumped about seven yards at 95
mph and four yards at 85 mph. (See chart on the next page for full results.) These numbers establish a baseline for fairway woods. When you hit
TAKING TURF Viktor Hovland hits down on his 7-wood, even makes a little divot.
off the turf. Don’t take a divot, don’t hit down, just let the club work through impact on a shallow arc and trust the loft on the clubface to do the work. It sounds reasonable. It’s also, accord- ing to data from recent robot testing we conducted with Golf Laboratories in San Diego, more nuanced than that. For most of the clubs we tested, from fairway woods to long irons, getting a little steeper is worth trying. More than any other spot in the bag, the gap between your driver and lon- gest iron remains a mystery. Most golf- ers patch it with whatever club came in their set or take a recommendation on faith and move on. Few golfers re- ally know what those clubs are doing at impact, like how the ball is launching,
down on the ball with a high-lofted fair- way wood, spin drops and distance goes up. (One caveat: Lowering spin might flatten a shot’s landing angle, which could affect its ability to hold the green.) The 5-wood tells a similar story. With a downward strike, nearly 700 rpm of spin came off at 95 mph, with an in- crease of almost six yards of carry. Less spin on a club already launching high means the ball will stop climbing earli- er and carry further instead of peaking. Again, the physics make sense. What’s interesting is the 7-wood only saw modest carry gains of roughly two
78 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JUNE 2026
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