The “MOI Rating” characterizes drivers based on the measured Moment of Inertia of a driver (stability on off-center hits) in the heel-toe direction. The limit is 5,900 grams-centimeters squared, plus a 100-point tolerance.
Measurements were conducted by Tom Mase, a long-time member of the Golf Digest Technical Panel and emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly.
All drivers on this year’s Hot List are very stable on off-center hits. Today, drivers that are pushing closer to the limit will lose less in relation to their on-center ball speed on extreme mis-hits than drivers lower on the scale. Again, that is mostly true on extreme mis-hits.
How much off-center hit stability you want in your driver is a fairly simple equation: The less you miss the center of the face, the less important extreme stability is to you. The more important lowering spin is to optimizing your tee shots, the more you will benefit from drivers that are not pushing the extreme limits of MOI.
In short, MOI is not a cure-all, and even the lowest MOI drivers on the Hot List this year feature a dramatically higher MOI than the most popular drivers on the market of a little more than a decade ago. A higher MOI driver is simply not a magic wand, as Titleist’s Chuck Golden explains. “The first thing that people kind of forget but need to realize is that MOI is really not about distance gain, it’s about mitigating distance loss on off-center hits,” said Golden, Titleist’s director of club R&D. “MOI does not make shots straighter, and it does not improve the spin and launch consistency across the face. Spin and launch consistency are a function of the face material that you’re using, where your center of gravity is, how you’ve engineered the curvature of the face, and MOI. It’s all those things working in concert with one another.”
That said, we think most average golfers would benefit from drivers at least in the Above Average range on our MOI scale, presuming a high MOI does not negatively affect how consistently you return the clubhead to hit the ball in the center of the face, square to the target line. It’s worth noting that of the top drivers in our Hot List criterion of Performance chosen by each of our three handicap groups, while more than half of those favorites reached the High rating for MOI, none were rated as Extreme in our MOI scale.
We slotted drivers into four groups: MODERATE—Less than 4,500 grams-centimeters squared ABOVE AVERAGE—4,500-4,900 HIGH—4,900-5,500 EXTREME—Higher than 5,500
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com