Bold Color, Bold Shaping – The Aeroficient Cobra KING F9 SPEEDBACK DRIVER

Let’s get real.

More often than not, the only problem golf companies are trying to solve is lack of new product. It’s rare when a company starts with a problem and offers a product as an actual solution. Tired as it may be to some of us, Fast and Forgiving in all its various forms still sells, so there’s no reason for our friends at the equipment companies to wander too far off script. A good story and more of the same is, more often than not, a recipe for success.

That’s why, for me anyway, it’s refreshing when a golf company can clearly layout the design challenge it sought to overcome and then explain how it was able to solve a particular problem. Case in point, the Cobra KING F9 SPEEDBACK. Yes, yes, the end result is still fast and forgiving, but at least there’s some substance to how we got here, which is why I’m willing to give Cobra a pass for making up a word (Aeroficient) to describe the design of its new driver.

Aerodynamic and Low CG Don’t Mix

The problem, as Cobra sees it, is that to get good aerodynamic properties, you have to sacrifice in other places. Better aerodynamic can translate to faster swing speed and ultimately faster ball speeds in a way the USGA doesn’t regulate. But, when you look at the drivers with good aerodynamic properties – PING G400, TaylorMade M4, Callaway Rogue, what you find are center of gravity locations that range from mid (PING and Callaway) to high (TaylorMade).

Raised/domed crowns, turbulators, etc. all that stuff that makes for better aerodynamics pushes weight up and the center of gravity invariably follows. Almost everybody claims low and back. Almost nobody actually is. That’s especially true with aerodynamically efficient designs.

So how you do you make a more aeroficient driver? Cobra’s solution was to reshape the driver in some seriously aggressive ways. Considering how adverse golfers are to anything remotely non-traditional, it’s fair to say Cobra is making a bold move with F9 SPEEDBACK. Will golfers be receptive? I’m not sure, but I love that Cobra is going for it.

Aeroficiency

Aeroeficiency (I hate myself) begins with a crown that’s 12% larger than F8’s. The larger crown requires a bit of stiffening to prevent energy loss, so Cobra uses a what it calls PWR Ridges to enhance stability (and possible aid in alignment). Normally a big crown is a recipe for higher CG, but with F9 SPEEDBACK, Cobra actually wraps the crown (image below) into the skirt (the side) section of the driver. Despite the larger surface area, Cobra saves about 4 grams.

Next Cobra raised the entire skirt and the rear sections of the club. It creates a slightly boxier look with a trailing edge flat enough to mount a license plate on. The raised back end – think about the rear of a Ferrari –reduces aerodynamic drag. To my eye, it looks like a bigger, more exaggerated take on PING’s Vortec, albeit without the cavity. A bit more drag reduction still is achieved by way of rounded leading edges on the crown and sole.

 

If that was all the engineers did, you’d have an aerodynamically efficient driver with the highest CG of any non-Max Cobra driver in recent memory. To pull the weight back down, Cobra added a big chunk of mass to the bottom rear of the club where sole and skirt meet. It’s a bit like a fin or the keel of a boat. Pictures don’t do the best job at conveying how unique the shaping is, but it’s the signature design feature of the F9 SPEEDBACK.

The driver looks conventional at address, but side and sole views reveal that it’s perhaps the most radically different take on driver shaping since Callaway and Nike took their shots with square.

To validate the aerodynamic properties of the new driver, Cobra did some robot testing against the competitive set. It added mass where needed to ensure all drivers were the same weight and used the same shaft in every head. Under the same force, the KING F9 SPEEDBACK was a bit faster than M4, faster still than G400, and about 1.5 MPH faster than the Callaway Rogue. Mind you, this test was force equivalent to 120 MPH of head speed, so the differences are more pronounced than the average golfer should reasonably expect. The takeaway is that Cobra believes that the F9 SPEEDBACK driver has the best aerodynamics in golf.

With the aerodynamics and center of gravity stuff mostly out of the way, let’s look at some other features of the Cobra F9 SPEEDBACK.

Discrete Lofts

At the risk of minimizing the importance of the SPEEDBACK design, it’s my non-negotiable opinion that the most significant upgrade cobra made to its 2019 driver lineup is a move back to discrete lofts. Going as far back as Amp Cell, Cobra was in a group with Nike, TaylorMade, and Mizuno that, at one time or another, leveraged an all lofts in one head design philosophy. One head, one loft, a ton of hosel settings, and boom, one size fits all – at least that was the theory. TaylorMade was one and done (R1) with the idea. Nike left the golf business, and last year Mizuno moved back to discrete stamped lofts. For 2019, Cobra is doing the same. Finally!

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With F9 SPEEDBACK Cobra will offer discrete 9°, 10.5° and 12° heads. Junior and Women’s heads will be stamped 12.5°. I’d wager the significance of this particular change is going to show up in next year’s Most Wanted testing. Over the past several seasons, Cobra has almost invariably been near the top in driver ball speed, but we’ve had issues with a segment of our testers hitting them straight. I’ve long suspected the face angle implications that come with loft adjustments were at least part, if not all, of the problem. I can’t overstate how big of a deal this is from a performance and fitting standpoint.

With the change to discrete lofts comes a tweak to the Cobra adapter. Physically and functionally, the adapter is unchanged . The cobra tips you have will work just fine, but instead of using absolute lofts, the new adapters show the amount of adjustment (+1°, -1.5°, etc.) rather than an absolute loft. You can still adjust by 1.5° in either direction, and there are still upright settings, but it’s a cleaner way to show the degrees of change and eliminates the confusion that came from dealing with standard and plus adapters.

The 9° head is the + Model

Deviating from the last several years, Cobra will not offer a F9+. Instead, Cobra is handling the needs of the typical plus (+) player a bit differently. The mass properties (center of gravity, MOI, etc.) vary between lofts. The 9-degree head is designed to be a true spin killer. That comes via a lower and more forward CG.

Cobra acknowledges that launch and spin difference between F8 and F8+ didn’t prove to be significant. That should be different with the F9 SPEEDBACK. For the faster swinger or the guy that needs to kill spin, the 9° SPEEDBACK should drop spin by about 500 RPM over F8+.

The 10.5° and 12° lofts should perform more like previous standard models. That means a bit higher trajectory and bit higher MOI.

Loft Specific Low Face Radii

As with previous designs, the F9 will offer dual roll. What that means is that the curvature of the face from top to middle isn’t the same as it is from middle to bottom. By using dual roll, Cobra is better able to optimize launch conditions on mishits above or below center. What’s different this time around is that the low face radii will differ between lofts. The premise is that higher speed players don’t need as much help getting low face shots in the air, and they certainly don’t want the spin penalty that comes from more loft. The lower roll radius of the 9° head will produce a lower launch than it will in the 10.5°. Along the same lines, slower swing speed players – guys who play 12° heads – need higher launch and more spin on low face hits, so the lower roll radius is designed to produce higher launch on a low face miss.

Milled Face

We covered Cobra’s milled face story last year. The company maintains that CNC milling the face allows it to more consistently produce its bulge and roll radii and dial in the thickness of each region to maximize ball speed. The design hasn’t change in any notable way from F8, but it’s nonetheless worth mentioning.

Movable Weights

Cobra has been all over the map with its movable weight systems in recent years. With F9 SPEEDBACK, it’s sticking with a familiar 2-weight, front to back system. The weights themselves are 14g and 2g. Hopefully, you know how this works by now. Put the heavy weight in the front for lower trajectory and spin. Put the heavy weight back for a higher trajectory, a bit more spin, and an MOI boost.

Cobra’s ability to move mass and impact ball flight is always among the best in the industry and the system itself is incredibly efficient in that there’s not much mass tied up in the structure to support the weights. It’s also simple enough that most golfers can understand it. Bottom line, it’s not a wheel that needed reinventing. Cobra did well not to overthink it.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that weights themselves look like smaller versions of what was used on Fly-Z+. That’s a driver that many remember fondly and some still play. That small detail may boost interest in the driver, while the bold yellow colorway ensures it won’t be missed.

About that Paint

Let’s put it out there. The yellow is bold. Not since Sasquatch has a club manufacturer dared go all-in or almost all-in on yellow. It’s going to be polarizing, but Cobra is at its best when it takes risks. Cobra thinks yellow is a fast color (during the product presentation it showed pictures of yellow Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Formula 1 cars), and well, we’ve already talked about the importance of fast. The company showed Rickie prototypes in several different colorways and Rickie chose yellow – even over Orange. Rickie liked the yellow, so you get yellow.

For those who don’t have the stomach for yellow, Cobra is offering a safe color. Avalanche sits somewhere between frost white and light gray. I was leaning heavily avalanche myself, but when I was fit into the Project X HZRDUS Yellow, the yellow accented head just felt right. A little color never hurt anyone.

Stock Shafts & Grips

Cobra will gain be using 100% real deal shafts that should fit a wide range of golfers.

• For those seeking low launch and low spin, Cobra is offering the Fujikura ATMOS Black TS 7 (S,X).
• The new Project X HZRDUS Smoke 60 (S,X) provides low-mid launch.
• The Fujikura ATMOS Blue TS 6 (R,S,X) is the middle of the road offering.
• For slower swing players and those needing higher launch, Cobra is offering the UST Helium 50 (R,L)

Gearheads will likely notice that the ATMOS shafts offered by Cobra are black instead of the familiar ATMOS white. According to Cobra, due to Tour player demand, Fujikura has started making some ATMOS profiles in black. I’ve confirmed with Fujikura that the shafts are exactly what Cobra says they are. Cobra felt the new black colorways looked better with its yellow and avalanche heads.

The stock grip is a Cobra Connect enabled Lamkin Crossline 58+. Cobra is working with other grip manufacturers and expects to expand its offerings beyond Lamkin in the not so distant future.

Retail price for F9 Speedback Driver is $449. Availability begins January 18, 2019.

For more information, visit Cobragolf.com.

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Pros vs. Joes: What’s in the Bag (powered by Arccos)

After every PGA Tour event, golf fans can view a “What’s In The Bag” for the winner. Hyper-custom shafts and high-tech specs abound.

You can learn that Tiger Woods had a 9.5-degree TaylorMade M3 driver with a Diamana D+ White 70TX shaft when he won his 80^th Tour event at East Lake. Even if you can’t relate to the specs played by the pros, you can still glean valuable information from their bag makeups.

In the latest installment of this series with Arccos, we’re looking at a WITB for amateurs and comparing it to the pros. What can you learn from the decisions pros and top amateurs are making with their 14 clubs?

Using the massive Arccos dataset – more than 100 million shots taken during nearly two million rounds – we’re able to analyze the bag makeup of a wide variety of amateur players. Arccos tracks all on-course performance data via sensors installed in the grips of clubs. The system automatically records and analyzes all of a golfer’s stats, uses Artificial Intelligence to show a personalized strategy for every shot, and leverages advanced analytics to inform practice regimens.

Analyzing full bag makeup across all user types, the most common 14 clubs for all amateurs are:

Seems fairly standard. Almost 16% of Arccos users – no matter their handicap – have this composition. Compared to the recent PGA Tour winners, the numbers are similar, but there’s variety in two key spots: the clubs between 3-wood and 4-iron and wedges.  Here are the clubs chosen at those key spots for the most recent PGA Tour winners of the 2018 season.

You’ll notice a few things right off the bat. First, there’s only one hybrid in the bunch (Keegan Bradley.) Next, there’s variety across the board in wedge composition, but there are almost always four wedges. Using Arccos data, we found that single-digit handicappers average 3.64 wedges. Comparatively, 20+ handicappers average only 3.23 wedges. This discrepancy may not seem like much, but it clearly shows that the best players – amateur and pro – lean toward having four wedges.

(One of the perks of having Arccos is the ability to easily spot underperforming clubs. A quick look at usage stats could show that you actually are hitting your 5-wood once a round but have a 30-yard gap in your pitching wedge and sand wedge. Easy fix!)

So far Arccos data has compared 4-irons and 4-hybrids, analyzed woods and hybrids for each handicap level and examined a pro’s bag makeup against amateurs. The overarching theme: decisions for each club that earns its way into your bag are personal, and you can only make educated and informed decisions through data. Knowing your shot data – club usage, proximity to the hole, Smart Distance – is available to all Arccos users for every club. Use data to your advantage and begin to see lower scores.

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Foresight Launches Educational Platform: PEAK

If knowledge is power, then launch monitors are golf’s nuclear energy. The sheer quantity of data these units can disseminate in fractions of a second is enough to overwhelm any general consumer, let alone certified teaching professionals. The information is generationally unique. Players even a decade ago didn’t have such universal access to this quality and quantity of club and ball data.

That said, information is meaningless if the end user can’t apply it in a way which helps themselves or others improve. As such, Foresight Sports, makers of the most accurate launch monitors in the industry (GCQuad, GC2 with HMT) launched a proprietary educational platform, titled PEAK (Performance. Education. Analysis. Knowledge.)

PLATFORM

PEAK Level 1: Launchpad Course is a series of three online modules (clubhead data, ball launch data, ball flight data) each of which is broken down into specific learning segments. Depending on how much background knowledge the student has with the material presented, each sub-topic requires 5-10 minutes to complete. The systematic presentation of content starts with video instruction featuring Foresight’s Director of Education, Liam Mucklow, which is followed by several animations for the more visually inclined learners. Pieces of text from instructors like Martin Hall and Butch Harmon are interspersed throughout each session as are several quiz questions to check for understanding.

The variety of presentation formats keeps the course moving at a reasonable pace, though there is some repetition in places. That said, most people taking this course are likely doing so to gain access to high-level information in an accessible and efficiently presented package. In this context, Foresight is working off the premise that engagement comes from the content, less than the delivery method.

From a pedagogical perspective, and keep in mind this is Foresight’s first foray into the educational environment, the questions and content felt, at times, out of order. Because 75% accuracy is required to pass each sub-section and move on to the next one (some of which have as few as three questions), it might make more sense to start each lesson with a list of key points which are then explored in depth and eventually followed by a quiz of at least 6-8 questions. If the primary purpose is formatting instruction so others can learn, a couple of tweaks might be in order.

CONTENT

As an introductory course, the primary objective is to explain the capabilities of Foresight’s bellwether offering, the GC Quad, which costs roughly $18,000. That said, owners of the GC2 (with or without HMT) will find the material just as applicable, and though it’s not required to own a Foresight launch monitor to enroll in the course, at an initial cost of $295, it might be too much for non-Foresight owners to stomach.

Without giving away too much, Foresight uses cameras and proprietary software to measure club data the instant before impact and ball data immediately after impact. Comparatively, radar-based systems, such as Trackman, use Doppler technology to track ball flight but have to extrapolate ball and club data. Camera-based systems have every advantage when it comes to indoor environments where limited flight is an issue and accuracy of ball and club data is paramount. Conversely, radar-based systems (Trackman) are both more expensive and space intensive. Trackman’s flagship model (Trackman 4) starts at $19,000 and if you want to use it indoors, add $6000 for simulator specific software. Because radar-based systems track ball flight, more horizontal and vertical space is required to get accurate readings.

Of the three primary topics in Level 1, the first segment on club head data is the most in depth. Foresight cameras (two in the GC2 and four in the GCQuad) use fiducials (small silver adhesive dots) to triangulate and precisely measure myriad pieces of data relative to club head speed, path, impact location, angle of attack, and impact loft (dynamic loft). Radar-based systems (Trackman) are primarily result-oriented (showing ball flight) and as such don’t have the capability to accurately produce data points like delivered lie angle, which is far more accurate than hitting off a lie-board and might help explain why you pull your wedges more often than your three-wood.

Moreover, because dynamic loft is measured based on the flat triangulated plane of fiducials, Foresight can account for bulge and roll in all metalwoods to give players a more accurate read on exactly how much loft the player is delivering to the ball at impact. There’s a lot to digest with respect to clubhead data, and realistically, this topic could merit its own advanced course offering. As such, we’ll save closure rate, the three axes of rotational velocity and normal vectors for paying subscribers.

The second section on ball launch data works to establish the underpinnings of how initial launch and spin contribute to ball flight. It introduces users to terms like azimuth and spin axis tilt. While the nomenclature can be a little intimidating at first – full disclosure, I repeated several of the mini-lessons to wrap my head around how face-to-path influences spin axis – the visual demonstrations provide much-needed clarity. The third and shortest topic covers calculated figures like apex (maximum height) and carry distance which while accurate, likely have more value in a clubfitting context than an instructional one.

There isn’t much inside the golf industry which is universally true, but the quest to shoot lower scores is a challenge shared by all. Improvement requires, more than anything, quality root cause analysis. In turn, the query is only as good as the data feeding it – or “junk in junk out” as my first computer science professor liked to remind us.

Commercial grade launch monitors and the knowledge base required to interpret the varied layers of data used to be reserved for teaching professionals, OEM R&D teams, and the engineers who created them. But now, launch monitors are becoming commonplace within the industry. Professional golfers use them for practice and on the range before competitive rounds. Consumers expect any clubfitter to have one on hand to help determine if an equipment change is in order, and competitive players – from elite amateurs to the B-flight club champion – all are now using data to find some measure of progress. At MyGolfSpy, we rely on Foresight products for all of our #Datacratic Most Wanted testing and product reviews. Because objective information is the foundation of how MyGolfSpy operates, it’s imperative we use the most accurate products available.

Creating shared language and a common understanding helps both the teacher and the student. It shifts the conversation toward one based on objective information, which still leaves plenty of room for conjecture and debate. That said, the primary challenge moving forward won’t be the existence of information, rather continued education which takes potentially complex information and simplifies it in a way which maintains the integrity of the data but allows players with even a basic understanding to digest it. No doubt, easier said than done, however, it seems a differentiated approach which perhaps offers truncated or “lite” version of some modules might be in order.

PRICING/AVAILABILITY

PEAK Level 1 is currently available at a flat rate of $295. PGA Professionals can receive 2 MSR credits for course completion, and the intention is to release PEAK Level 2 in the coming months. As the platform expands, the hope is users engage with one another via the connect online forum to extend conversations, post questions and interact with Foresight instructors and staff.

No doubt there will be critics who feel that reading divots and ball flight can tell players everything they need to know and while not entirely incorrect, it’s a bit like pretending taking a child’s temperature with the back of your hand is just as good as running a comprehensive metabolic blood panel. Because we know better, it means we can do better, though some will maintain too much information only creates confusion and analytical paralysis.

What do you think? Is golf’s new parlance the key to unlocking a more coherent and effective instructional environment or is an abundance of information too much of a good thing?

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