Rory McIlroy has a driver he likes and he’s looking forward to playing it for the foreseeable future.
And why is this significant? Glad you asked.
In May, McIlroy’s equipment sponsor, TaylorMade, announced it was moving to a two-year product cycle for its metal woods starting with the Qi4D family released last January. With the move, TaylorMade became the fourth of the six largest OEMs in the sport to move its metalwoods to a two-year product cycle, joining Ping, Srixon and Titleist. As of now, Callaway and Cobra have yet to share any intentions of moving off a yearly release cadence for their drivers.
“I think being able to use the same driver for say like an 18-month period I think just gives guys a little bit more of a level of comfort,” McIlroy said Tuesday at the Tour Championship.
McIlroy, who said the move was a popular one among TaylorMade staffers, has a bit of a unique perspective on the situation given his struggles in recent years to move into new drivers. This season, with the Qi4D driver he switched into during its first week of availability in November, McIlroy is again among the top drivers on the PGA Tour, ranking second in Strokes Gained: Off the Tee. (That’s despite, at times, complaining about his driver swing.)
He is averaging a career-high 330 yards in distance and his accuracy is more than three points higher than in 2024.
But just a season ago, McIlroy continued to use a TaylorMade Qi10 model from 2024 instead of 2025’s Qi35. Fellow TaylorMade stablemate Scottie Scheffler also continued using the Qi10 up until two weeks ago, when he seemingly switched to the Qi4D for good during his win at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
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With TaylorMade not releasing a driver in 2027, Scheffler and McIlroy will head into the offseason knowing they won’t even have to consider finding a new driver. Pros are never forced to switch to a new driver, but they usually will see some performance gain from year to year that motivates them.
However, they won’t make a move at the expense of comfort, and the longer they use a driver, the more comfortable they get.
“You think about you really like a driver you’re playing, and then something else is put in your hand say in October, November time, so nine or 10 months after you get your driver — all the manufacturers do a great job of fitting you into what is the best product for you, but they’re all slightly different,” McIlroy explained. “Thankfully I found a really good one that I like at the minute, but we call them snowflakes. Like one Qi4D with the same head, the same loft, same weighting. I’m on the exact same, to me sometimes just doesn’t feel quite the same. It could be me, it could be a mental thing that I have.”
McIlroy also pointed out that pros are often only able to use a driver for 18 months before it wears out and potentially becomes non-conforming. He and Scheffler both had their Qi10s fail USGA conformance tests at the PGA Championship last season and had to use backups.
“The heads go. I’ve obviously fallen foul of that at the PGA last year, Scottie as well,” he said. “You really can only play a driver for a year to a year and a half before you’ve got to switch it out anyway.”
Now with the two-year product cycle, McIlroy will just be starting the fitting process for a new driver by the time his gamer starts getting close to worn out.
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