Introduction 

If you ever wanted to know who those idiots are that buy a driver sight unseen, or testing it, I’m that idiot. I like tech, I’m a golf nerd, so when I see something that has the potential to give me the edge, I’m prepared to give it a go. Sometimes it has worked in my favour, sometimes it’s been a dismal failure.

LA Golf released a new driver which they claim changes the game. Being one of the afore mentioned idiots, I decided to give it a go and order one, what the worst that can happen? Lose some money… hmmm, okay, that’s not great. Maybe I should have thought a little longer before clicking the button.

Interestingly enough, you’d normally see fanfare from social media influencers, but not in this case. Two weeks after release and there is only one review, which was quite positive. I’m not sure if they didn’t send out any, the influencers were too busy, or maybe they were sent them and didn’t like them. It’s hard to say without knowing why, but the reviews just didn’t exist outside of some guy who had been in a car accident and couldn’t test it. I really think LA Golf needs to rethink this strategy. My advice to LA Golf is to spend less on your big Beverley Hills party and get some review units out to people. 

On top of that, Bryson isn’t actually using the driver, which may have some people concerned. I’m not overly concerned with this. Adam Scott codesigned the Oz.1i putter and it only started to appear in his bag many months after release. I think the Masters was the first time I saw it in his bag in competition and that’s 6 months after release. When a change has the potential to adjust your income by millions, you only make changes when you’re 100% sure about the impact.

I’d love to tell you there was a good reason for buying this, but there was none. My driver is in a pretty good place with me hitting most fairways in regulation. If I can grab an extra couple of yards that’s always good, but with an average clubhead speed in the 100-105 band, I’m not in a terrible place.

Website and ordering process

The webpage is good, and the guided process (called “What’s your face ID”) for deciding what club to buy was easy to use. It doesn’t feel as mature as some websites, but overall I’d give it a B+. If I was to give some feedback, there are three things missing:

1. Selecting a grip size and number of tapes

The shaft area on the website allows you to select from a variety of grips when ordering a shaft, but there is no such option for driver orders. This is made more surprising given Bryson’s ties to LA Golf, the use of his image for marketing, and the fact that you can’t actually get a driver with his Jumbomax configuration. I made a note in comments about a midsize grip and number of tapes.

2. Shaft information 

When you select your shaft stiffness, you’re presented with three options: A series, Gold (extra cost) and DJ Series (extra cost). What’s missing is the information on why you would select one over the other. Normally I don’t expect it from head manufactures, but they are dealing with a lot of shafts from different brands. LA Golf has their own shafts so they should be in a better position to offer recommendations. I feel they need to do a better job of selling their premium shafts.

3. Lead times for build and shipping

The website isn’t currently specific about lead times. If you go to a website like LAB, it’s quite specific about what you can expect. On the LA Golf site, their is information on lead times for shafts, but nothing for drivers, which is surprising given the effort they put into the launch of the driver. After emailing LA Golf, I was advised there was a 2-3 week lead time for orders. This should be on the website.

Pricing

I’m going to use US pricing for ease of comparison. The LA Golf Driver retails for $649 with an A-series shaft which is roughly the same as what the Titleist GT2 (or other premium drivers would retail for). It’s actually not bad pricing if the driver performs as the A series shaft is a slightly more premium shaft than most suppliers provide with the stock pricing options. I purchased it with the Gold Series premium shaft, an extra cost of about $200 over the stock shaft. 

Aesthetics and construction

The LA Golf driver arrived in the usual golf club shipping type of box, not dissimilar to LAB. The club was nicely boxed, well protected to ensure there were no dents or scratches along the way. 

I planned to do an unboxing and then it arrived and I acted like a two year old. (Note MGS, if you send me gear I promise I will show more restraint)

It’s shipped with a headcover (choice between black and white), head removal tool and obviously the club itself. It comes with a fake newspaper, hand written note from the company owner and an LA Golf decal. As one would expect, the head is plastic wrapped so you know someone hasn’t hit it before you. The quality of the head cover is okay, a slightly cheap feel but on a par with many of the headcovers these days. Not really comparable to an aftermarket like Hatch which I use on my set.

From an aesthetics perspective, the club looks really good, the top view is clean, almost carbon fibre-like with no distractions. I like the matt finish, no glare or reflections to distract you. When comparing it to my GT2, the bulge and roll of the face is definitely noticeably.

On the bottom of the head, your presented with a LA Golf text pattern. Not 100%. convinced with the pattern on the bottom but maybe it will grow on me. I feel like a clean design would have worked well.

They indicate any configuration requests should go in comments, and where I will mark them down slightly is mine came with a standard size grip and I requested a midsize. It’s not a big deal as I plan to move it to a Gripmaster leather grip, but with the cost of the driver they should have got it right.

Head configurations options

Unlike many of the drivers today, the LA Golf driver doesn’t come with configuration options like the Surefit on my Titleist driver, or anything more flexible like the DS Adapt system on the Cobras. The LA Golf Driver only has loft options ranging from 9 to 12. The reason seems to be that the LA Golf curved face offsets for bad swings with the face curve, so it turns your hooks into draws and your slices into fades. I guess we’ll find that out in the review. There are weight options though, to be fair to LA Golf, so that does allow for more customisation towards draw or fade bias.

First Impressions

It’s always hard to do a direct comparison between two clubs when you are not using the same shaft, and let’s be honest here, I’m not buying an extra LA Golf shaft with a Titleist tip just for this test. I’m stupid, but I’m not stupid and a billionaire.

In theory, the Hzrdus shaft is a stock standard no cost option, so the premium shafts from LA Golf should theoretically be a big improvement over the stock, but comparable to the TPT. 

My golf sim is a little confined for space so I find it hard to have the freedom to swing freely using a driver without being conscious of your surrounds. As a result, I tend to take my R50 onto the course and use it there for driver practice. As Murphy’s Law would have it, the chance of rain is directly proportional to how much you want to test a club. I did however managed to get a 10 minute hit. We don’t have a range so I basically hit 10 balls off the tee, and 10 balls from the fairway (some tee up) towards the hole. it’s a 580 yard par 5 with a wide fairway, so hitting into the wind with wet fairways meant I wasn’t reaching in two without an act of God intervening.

If you’re looking for some formal numbers in the interim, the first YouTube review with numbers has gone up here

I hit 8 out of the 10 with the LA Golf as I hadn’t hit it before and I wanted to gauge how it went without a warmup. I hit my Titleist on swings 6 and 7 and then I figured the 8,9,10 would give me a good benchmark against the Titleist. 

Surprisingly, all 10 hit the fairway which is probably a good sign of things to come, particularly given the hitting into the wind which was going to be less forgiving. There were a couple short of the Titleist, mostly the warm ups but it seems like 8,9 and 10 all beat the Titleist, ranging in distances of 2 yards to 8 yards in distance. Given I was testing against the TPT that was a pleasant surprise. 

My miss is mostly a toe hook and the one toe hook I hit was actually really good with only one ball near the left edge of the fairway.

This may not be something everyone likes to do, but for those who do, I also tried 3 drivers off the deck. This is something I am normally quite comfortable with, as I tend to hit it with a baby fade. All 3 were absolutely beautiful, and I’d be happy hitting them on my previous driver any day of the week. 

The sound is definitely quite different to the Titleist. I found it to have more of Tinny sound, so I’m not sure if I agree with the previous reviewer.  It does feel good and the sound isn’t bad so it’s not a negative.

Summary of first impressions

Obviously 20 balls isn’t going to tell me much, hence the reason this is a first impressions not a review, but I would have to say that it does like a really straight driver. 

LA Golf claim that their new driver is a game changer due to the bulge and roll specific to swing speed. Is it more accurate? It’s hard to validate this 100% without using comparable shafts. I wasn’t quite expecting it to live up to the marketing hype of being ground breaking, and the lack of online reviews had me somewhat concerned. Someone like me doesn’t expecting to be posting one of the first couple of thoughts for a driver in a day and age of internet and social media, so the closer I got to posting this, the more I got concerned.

That said, I will say that I am pleasantly surprised. It’s actually a damn good driver based on my first impressions. It seems like it may have the edge of the GT2 for both distance and accuracy and that I did not expect, particular from a gen 1 driver. I have yet to test it against my Hzrdus but my TPT generally outperforms that on any given day. I also think it’s important to note that I’ve only had a few hits so I really need a substantially set of sessions to validate this. 

What’s more concerning is I am actually thinking of putting this in my bag for tomorrow’s competition, despite how dumb that sounds. With comp tomorrow, I should be able to get a better set of data on Sunday so I’ll post the data then.

Update: 27 April 2025

Managed to get out for 45 minutes again. Weather was still sketchy so I decided not to take the R50 and just hit some side by sides with my rain covers on the golf cart.  

First 2 driving holes I played just the LA Golf Driver as there was some residual traffic on our golf course, but as I got through that I had more opportunity to hit the two side by side. 

First two holes weren’t great, and didn’t inspire much confidence in the LA golf.  No matter what LA Golf tell you, this thing isn’t hook proof if you try hard enough and I put one out of bounds. Once I got past traffic I hit my GT2 with TPT and it wasn’t much better than the LA Golf, so it was clearly a swing issue, not the driver. After working on my swing for a couple of minutes, I managed to get some decent drives out. 

This was the last hole to put straightness and grouping into perspective once I got to grips with the driver. Three drives all within 5 yards of each other, and hit about 285 yards which is decent for me. I am normally straight but I don’t think I’ve hit 3 drives within 5 yards of each other. 

This photo shows the distance from the tee.

And distance into the green. Probably a little long leaving me having to fade a shot into the green from about 175 yards on our par 5 18th and a good shot at birdie. 

Sadly my gamin watch didn’t catch the drive (probably because I’m hitting multiple shots). It caught the drive on the 15th which shows the sort of distance I’m getting. For those who aren’t savvy with m, this is 281 yards.

Update: 5th May 2025

Okay, had the session with the R50 and it was disappointing. The R50 failed me a little. I think I went out a little late in the afternoon when the sun was low and whilst I was in the shadows, the data was a little off on some of the shots. Slices when the ball was straight, etc

I think the backlighting impacted the shots. I had straight shots or draws registering a big slices on the Garmin which was disappointing. 

That said, based on the balls today, the results were pretty conclusive. I played 8 batches of 10 balls, starting with 12 and after 2 batches I lost one of the GT2 balls, so I had to revert to 5×2. I was using cheap Srixons for the test, so distances weren’t as long as normal:

1. For max distance, the LA Golf with upgraded shaft is marginally (+- 5yards) longer than my GT2 with Hzrdus. I expected this result due to the upgraded shaft. Max distance winner: LA GOLF
2. For max distance, the LA Golf and GT2 with TPT are on a par, and I’d give the edge to the GT2 with TPT. I’d hit 10 drives on one hole, and one hole the GT2 would be longer, the next batch the LA Golf would be longer. Max Distance winner: TIE
3. For max straightness the LA Golf driver wins hands down. The LA golf driver test balls were consistently in the fairway. On average, I’d say 4/5 balls on the fairway with the LA Golf, and 3.5/5 with the GT2. Max Straightness Winner: LA GOLF
4. For max forgiveness the GT2 wins, the LA golf driver test balls were consistently the shortest drives with mishits, even when comparing to the GT2 with Hzrdus, although it was margin (1-3 yards). The GT2 also had the most balls in the longest batch showing it was more likely to hit max numbers. Max forgiveness winner: GT2
5. The most wayward drives were more likely to be the GT2. I lost one ball during the test and it was one of the GT2 balls.  

Here are some of the shots that were at least close in numbers to compare similar club head speeds. My usual driving speed is about 105 so this was without a warm up. I normally use yellow balls which don’t register well with the Garmin so I bought a box of cheap Srixon’s for the test. These are about 10 yards shorter than normal and the smash factor is lower than I would expect. 

This pretty much supports my comments on the distances being comparable between the GT2 TPT and the LA Golf Gold Shaft

This view of the set shows the tighter grouping on the LA Golf over the GT2. You can see how much tighter the grouping with the LA Golf is.

Don’t worry too much about the shots being primarily left. The wind was a strongish left to right and I didn’t align the R50 properly.