The PGA Tour star who has made his own mini driver – and how you can do the same
The mini driver has been one of the equipment stories of the past year and now we have a different take on the club that more and more professionals are turning to.
The likes of Tommy Fleetwood, Max Homa, Adam Scott, Jake Knapp and Rory McIlroy have all experimented with one, Fleetwood and Knapp even using them to win tournaments.
This week Neal Shipley has been trying his version at the Valspar Championship in Florida.
The 2024 US Amateur runner-up generally and Low Amateur at last year’s Masters plays with the Ping G440 LST at 9˚ and he’s been playing around with the Ping G440 Max driver.
The Full Swing star has been using the 12˚ version and cut it down to 43 inches – so he has more loft and more like a 3-wood length club to help with a reduction in distance and an increase in control.
“One thing with the mini driver is that they’re a smaller head and less forgiving,” Shipley said. “But with this Max head, it has a really big head that’s on a really short shaft, so you can kind of feel really confident on it. I feel like it’s really straight and it’s certainly a club we might use this year on the Korn Ferry Tour, because there’s a lot of courses where you don’t need to hit it 300; 280 in the air is better. It would be a lot more forgiving than a 3-wood.”
Shipley calls it a ‘situational club’ and is another possible option off the tee rather than off the fairway, hitting into par 5s.
Elsewhere the American also has two 3-irons in the bag.
One 3-iron is quite rare in the modern game but two is very different. He has added loft to a Ping i230 3-iron to give him a club that travels around 235 yards and he also carries a stronger Ping Crossover 3-iron with less loft to cover a yardage of approximately 250 yards.
“My 6-iron was like 205 yards, 5-iron was, call it 215, and 4-iron was 225, so only 10-yard gaps between each club. At that end of the bag, you don’t need gaps that small,” Shipley said.
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