Play Equipment TaylorMade P790
Faster and more forgiving TaylorMade’s new P790 irons make changes inside and outside for more consistent speed by mike stachura
he third generation of TaylorMade’s P790 irons, which helped to define the “players distance” category when they were first introduced in 2017, boasts a thinner face and more than double the tungsten of its most recent version. That faster, more forgiving design is fuelled by a new, lighter urethane foam filling—Speedfoam Air—within the hollow-body design.
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THE DEEP DIVE The players’ distance iron category, one of whose primary stalwarts has been TaylorMade’s P790 since its introduction four years ago, is the fastest-growing iron segment in the game. From a
18 golfdigestme.com | september 2021
technology standpoint, it’s easily the most interesting. That’s probably because it’s also the most challenging. Essentially, the audience demands a somewhat compact look and single-piece forged feel of a
better players iron while craving at the same time a distance infusion usually reserved for the most game-improvement designs in the marketplace. The players iron category is producing more irons that push the boundaries of springy faces, what’s known as the coefficient of restitution (COR). But the challenge isn’t just to inject a little more ball speed into these faces; it’s to make these faces consistently fast. That’s exactly what’s at work with the third generation of the P790, which gets at the problem of better uniform speed and launch with changes to its distinctive internal urethane foam, the decreased and weight-saving thicknesses of the steels used both in the face and the body and more heavy tungsten than ever before in the P790 line to optimise centre of gravity and forgiveness. Inside the hollow, multi-piece design, what was known as Speedfoam is now significantly lighter (hence, Speedfoam Air). According to Matt Bovee, TaylorMade’s senior manager of iron product creation, the new version of the lightweight urethane material, is 69 percent less dense than the original, saving about 3.5 grams that can be redistributed in the head.
