PGA European Tour
Technical Report Oct 07
Player: Daniel Vancsik
Subject: MP-600 Fitting
By: Mark Duncombe - Technical Specialist: Tour Promotions
Background
As computer aided fitting becomes more widespread, we thought we'd share some occasional case studies with you from the Tour.
We've started with Daniel Vanscik's driving stats and how we helped one of the longest drivers on tour find more yards and tighten his dispersion.
Unless you've been hiding on the other side of the moon you will have heard and seen the hype surrounding the new Mizuno driver the MP600. Tour players are no different to the rest of us 'mortal' golfers and once they have seen or heard about something new they'll want to test it. Daniel Vanscik won the Madiera Island Open this year and as soon as we launched the MP-600 he couldn't wait to test one.
We started off by testing his old driver and quickly realised he was getting too much backspin. This caused Danny two problems.
Problem 1: The ball was landing at too steep an angle and when the ball hit the ground it basically stopped within a few yards of where it had pitched.
Problem 2: An excessive amount of backspin stopped the ball penetrating even a light headwind, never mind a strong breeze.
Solution
To start we copied the spec of his "gamer" driver (labelled 3) which was had 8.5 degrees of loft and a Grafalloy Axis 75X shaft. Once we changed to the MP-600 head the ball came off with a little less spin than his existing model but I still knew we could do better.
The new MP600 has two moveable weight slots that we call FastTrack which gives me the opportunity to increase/decrease spin and height and change direction to aid draw and fade.
We also made Daniel another driver (labelled 6) that would increase the velocity of club head and ball, create a little more initial launch height and reduce overall backspin. This would give Danny a higher more penetrating start to his flight with the ball landing on a shallower angle - to hit the ground running.
This second driver (6) used the slightly lighter Grafalloy Blue X shaft. The shaft has an incredibly stiff tip section that can aid in spin reduction. We went to a lighter shaft to concentrate more mass in the clubhead (increasing initial clubhead / ball velocity) and also to increase his initial launch angle.
The stats on the visual was taken from our TrackMan system which traces the ball with a radar over its entire flight. It shows that Daniel's new ball speed launch angle and backspin all added up to an incredible 332yards.
Needless to say - Daniel took the driver and in his next 2 tournaments led through the first 3 rounds of both and finished 3rd in both. Driving the ball as well as he is another win can't be far around the corner. Daniel's not a big name yet, but with driving like this expect to hear about him a lot more.