Gear: Wilson Staff Launch Pad irons
Price: $699.99 (4-PW) with KBS Tour 80 steel shafts and Wilson Staff 2 Crossline Mid grips; $799.99 with UST Mamiya Recoil 460 graphite shafts
Specs: Hollow-bodied irons with variable sole width
Available: Jan. 17, 2020
For high-handicap golfers, the most common problem when hitting tee shots with a driver is a slice. With irons, it’s hitting shots fat and making contact with the ground behind the ball before impact. It robs them of distance and consistency.
Wilson’s newest maximum game-improvement irons, the Staff Launch Pad irons, were designed to help golfers who shoot in the 90s and 100s get more distance and avoid hitting fat shots.
The key to helping these players make consistently better contact is the combination of a progressive sole design and an increased bounce angle. The Staff Launch Pad’s long irons have an extremely wide sole, much like a hybrid club, that skims over the turf. The sole width becones progressively more narrow through the mid-irons and eventually reaches a traditional game-improvement width in the short irons.
Wilson’s engineers also lifted the height of the leading edge by increasing the bounce angle, so the Staff Launch Pad irons are less likely to dig into the ground at impact.
To help golfers generate more ball speed, Wilson made the Staff Launch Pad irons hollow so the thin stainless steel faces can flex more efficiently at impact. The hollow design also helps place more weight low and back, away from the hitting area, to encourage a higher launch angle and a steeper angle of descent to help shots stop faster on the greens.
While the Wilson Staff Launch Pad irons are large, in the address position a players’ eyes naturally focus on the chrome topline, and surprisingly the large back section fades and does not become a visual distraction. In other words, at address the big club looks reassuring but not huge.