Ten of the Best: Fairway woods 2014

Ten fairway woods from 2014 on review, but which is the best?

Andy Roberts's picture
Tue, 4 Nov 2014
Ten of the Best: Fairway woods 2014

FOLLOWING a successful season of Golfmagic Ten of the Best equipment features, we end the year with our 2014 Fairway Woods test comprising ten fairway woods launched within the last 12 months. 

Our 2014 Fairway Woods Test was conducted at Europe's busiest driving range, the World of Golf at New Malden in south-west London, which last week opened its doors to the most advanced golf teaching facility in the UK featuring the very latest game-improvement technologies.

The World of Golf’s new Performance Centre – open to the public every day for 75 hours a week – is the only UK facility that boasts GC2 Launch Monitor with HMT, Trackman, Flightscope, Science & Motion (SAM) putting and the latest Swing Catalyst technologies all under the one roof.

Our Testers

Golfmagic Assistant Editor Andy Roberts (8-handicap) and Golfmagic Staff Writer Charlie Lemay (12-handicap) were joined by Golfmagic Readers Brian Tracy (5-handicap) and Ben Chappell (11-handicap).

About the test

After warming up for ten minutes in one of the practice bays, Andy, Charlie, Brian and Ben struck balls off both deck and tee peg with each fairway wood. Testers hit as many balls as they needed, ranging from five to as many as 15, before writing down their comments on each club.

Trackman shot data was used for the duration of the test (to vindicate comments) where both a laptop and giant screen positioned overhead provided testers with all the numbers needed to work with, such as carry, spin rate, ball speed, launch angle and offline dispersion.

Testers marked each fairway wood out of five for appearance, ten for feel and ten for performance (using the testing sheets we printed out prior to the test), culminating in a total score out of 25.

Each tester scored separately without consultation and the score presented for each fairway wood is an average of the four.

The overall scores and conclusion can be found on the final page of this feature.

With each fairway wood, we have also provided details of price, available lofts, loft tested, shaft and grip.

The test was carried out in alphabetical order and lasted approximately five hours between 10am and 3pm.

Click here to read our 2014 Fairway Woods Test

(If you'd rather skip straight to the results page, click here)