Tag: 2024 TaylorMade TP5x

TaylorMade’s Performance Decision Kit could be a great golf ball fitting option, but you can’t buy it

This is exactly what many golfers need.

With its namesake mountain looming in the background, twilight descending, and the empty, emerald-green fairway laid out in front of me, the 18th hole at Superstition Mountain Golf Club in Golf Canyon, Arizona, was the perfect place to have a little fun.

No one else was around that evening, so I dropped five or six three-ball sleeves of the newest golf balls on the ground and started hitting approach shots, pitch shots and chip shots until darkness made it too hard to see. I made little notes on a pad about how each ball felt and flew, how much it appeared to spin (I didn’t have a launch monitor), checked-up on the green and which balls seemed to end up closest to the hole.

It was the first time I’d really tested golf balls, and it has become a yearly ritual that starts my season every year, although, sadly, Central Connecticut is not as pretty as the Arizona desert in late March.

I have encouraged Golfweek readers to buy three-ball packs of newly released balls at the start of every season and test them against the ball they currently play on several occasions, so when I recently received TaylorMade’s Performance Decision Kit, I thought a brand had finally made the job of ball testing a little easier. Inside the box were six two-ball packs of each urethane-covered ball in the 2024 TaylorMade stable: TP5, TP5 Pix, TP5x, TP5x Pix, Tour Response and Tour Response Stripe.

One box, three different balls in both white and in each ball’s visual-technology version.

TaylorMade Performance Decision Kit
The TaylorMade Performance Decision Kit includes six two-ball packs of TaylorMade balls. (David Dusek/Golfweek)

But when I reached out to TaylorMade to find out when the Performance Decision Kit was going on sale to the public, I got the bad news: This unique box will not go on sale to consumers. It was created for select members of the media and influencers to make them aware of TaylorMade’s new offerings for 2024.

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I recently went to TaylorMade’s golf ball manufacturing plant in Liberty, South Carolina. I have also visited Callaway’s facility in Chicopee, Massachusetts, along with Titleist’s golf ball plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts, several times. These state-of-the-art facilities turn out millions of dozen boxes of golf balls every year thanks to lots of proprietary systems, customized machines and other automated processes. The assembly lines are built to make thousands of the same ball at a time, paint them, number them, add them to sleeves and then get those sleeves into dozen-ball boxes.

I assume creating something like the TaylorMade Performance Decision Kit involves a level of small-batch work that would be difficult to do at scale. In fact, it would likely fall to the custom golf ball department that handles corporate orders and other small-batch projects. Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t want TaylorMade and other brands to make dozens of boxes like this available to everyone.

For the last 20 years, the percentage of golfers who buy their clubs after going through a custom fitting season has dramatically increased because while a good-quality custom fitting session can take time, the result is a club that is ideally suited for the player. Once players go through a fitting for a driver or irons, they never buy “off the rack” again. Custom fitting for putters and wedges still lag behind woods and irons, but those numbers are going to climb.

Golf ball fittings? Almost no recreational golfers get fit for the ball they use, which is why a multi-ball pack sold as a fitting tool is something we need. It would make the process easier if you could buy a dozen box and get a sleeve of:

Any time I talk with a brand about helping golfers find the right clubs, they all say custom fitting is the key. If you don’t get custom fit for your woods, irons, wedges or putter, you are almost certainly leaving some performance behind. The same thing holds true with golf balls.

Unfortunately, TaylorMade’s Performance Decision Kit may be an example of a great idea that is not ready to become a reality for most golfers.

TaylorMade TP5, TP5x balls (2024)

According to TaylorMade, this core additive has never been used in golf balls.

Gear: TaylorMade TP5, TP5x balls (2024)
Price: $54.99 per dozen
Specs: Five-piece, urethane-covered golf balls available in white, yellow and Pix patterns.
Available: February 15

Who It’s For: Golfers who want an elite combination of distance off the tee and with long irons, plus greenside spin and a softer feel.

The Skinny: Adding a new material to the core of the 2024 TP5 and TP5x balls allowed TaylorMade to decouple the relationship between speed and feel, so its most-premium balls could each be made faster but feel softer.

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The Deep Dive: Historically, the two things that golfers want the most from a golf ball — more speed and better feel — have worked against each other. Manufacturers have worked with different materials and different manufacturing techniques to create better golf balls, but to get more speed, they have traditionally increased compression and produced firmer-feeling balls. Softer, better-feeling balls with lower compressions were more satisfying to hit, but that softer feel typically came at the expense of speed.

After taking three years instead of the typical two years to release an update to the 2021 TP5 and TP5x balls, TaylorMade feels that it has decoupled the old relationship between speed and feel and developed a way to give players more of both. 

Working with Dow Chemical, TaylorMade has added a material it calls Speed Wrap to the rubber in the core of the TP5 and TP5x. According to TaylorMade, this core additive has never been used in golf balls before but changes the way the ball sounds when you hit it, producing a softer, deeper sound. 

Golfweek had a chance to tour TaylorMade’s golf ball factory in Liberty, South Carolina, in late 2023, where TP5 and TP5x cores are turned into balls. When a TaylorMade representative dropped an old core and a new core on the ground and bounced them, the difference in sound was immediately apparent. The 2021 core produced a higher-pitched, clicking sound, while the 2024 core with the Speed Wrap additive sounded quieter and almost muffled.

TaylorMade TP5 (2024)
The five-layer TaylorMade TP5 for 2024. (David Dusek/Golfweek)

The Speed Wrap additive makes the balls sound and feel softer, but it does not make the new TP5 and TP5x balls faster. However, TaylorMade golf ball designers were able to make the cores in the 2024 TP5 and TP5x balls firmer, which gives them more speed, while the Speed Wrap softens the sound and feel produced at impact. The result, for most golfers, is a faster ball that also feels and sounds better.

Beyond changing the composition of the core in the TP5 and TP5x balls, TaylorMade has also updated the three mantle layers that encase the core. Each of the mantles has a different level of firmness, with the firmness increasing as one layer is added over another. The change in the level of compression, referred to as the delta, in the TP5 is about 53. The compression delta of the TP5x is 71.

On full-swing shots like drivers and 3-woods off the tee, the blunt strike from the club sends energy into the ball, through the mantle layers and into the core, activating it to generate speed and reduce spin. Full-swing shots hit with your short irons and wedges, which have more loft, make the balls behave differently. In those cases, the soft urethane cover can easily be grabbed by the grooves. Along with the added loft, it helps to create more spin for added control. On delicate chips and pitch shots, the core may not be activated at all, but the softness of the urethane cover layer again helps players generate more spin and control.

While both the 2024 TP5 and TP5x have a softer feel than their predecessors, the TP5 should still feel softer than the TP5x because it has a lower overall compression. The TP5x should provide players with more speed with wood and long irons because it is firmer, and it will generate a higher launch angle, too. The TP5, however, is designed to create slightly more spin than the TP5x with wedges.

TaylorMade TP5x (2024)
The five-layer TaylorMade TP5x golf ball. (David Dusek/Golfweek)

TaylorMade’s tour staff has added the new balls to their bag quickly, with Rory McIlroy experimenting with the TP5 early in 2024 before opting to play the standard TP5x and winning his fourth Dubai Desert Classic on January 21. LPGA Tour star Brooke Henderson also added the 2024 TP5x to her bag earlier this season.