One Bright Future

Titleist’s iconic ProV1 franchise increases its visibility even further

- Evan Rothman

Let’s cut to the chase: How is the new Pro V1 family better than previous offerings?

Michael Mahoney, VP, Titleist Golf Ball Marketing: The story for 2019 is pretty simple. We deliver more speed in the Pro V1 and Pro V1x while maintaining the flight, feel, spin and, most important, the scoring performance of both models.

How?

MM: We went through a process where we prototyped individual aspects of the entire ball. We started to see positive results from a bunch of that prototyping work. We combined it, and the result is a new core, casing layer and cover technology that all contribute to more ball speed in both balls. Is that a matter of what’s in the ball, or how it’s made?

MM: Both. For the golfer, the easiest way to understand it is that we added more “fast” material to the ball and took away some of the “slower” material. The cover is almost 20 percent thinner. Cover material is incredibly important to a ball’s performance, particularly when it comes to short-game feel and control. As a result, it sometimes has properties that don’t necessarily enhance speed. That was the breakthrough: engineering a thinner cover without disrupting its feel and spin control, while simultaneously engineering a faster casing layer to boost ball speed. On the core side, we changed both the formulation and the process, which allowed us to not only make any compression changes, but also to increase speed and decrease a little long-game spin, giving it more distance.

Titleist has offered tours of its Ball Plant #3 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, since 2017. What do visitors learn when seeing what goes into the making of Pro V1s?