The all-new PXG Lightning woods aren’t just the company’s latest generation of golf clubs, they’re the best they’ve ever made. We sat down with Caleb Kroloff, Director of Woods R&D at PXG, to find out how the brand engineered this impressive achievement.
If you’ve been keeping any kind of eye on PXG, you’ll have seen their woods line go from being a good but fledgling entry into the golf market, to one of the most interesting and technologically impressive offerings available.
The latest generation, the PXG Lightning series, is an outstanding next step for the engineering team, adding forgiveness in spades to the already ridiculously fast Black Ops woods from 2024.
Lightning has been one of TG’s favorite all-round performers in our 2026 drivers test, offering strengths for every level of golfer.
I was eager to find out exactly how PXG’s designers had managed to bring all those desired traits together, so I sat down with Caleb Kroloff, the company’s Director of Research & Development for Woods, to understand more about what sits under the hood to make these woods sing.
Today’s Golfer: Straight into the new Lightning family, Caleb, and the drivers have really impressed in our annual testing. They’re powerful, but also extremely consistent. Was that a focus for the design team this time?
Caleb Kroloff: I would say that it’s always an objective. We’re always looking to make things more forgiving, more consistent, longer. With Black Ops, we saw a lot of great things from player and robot testing, tour play, etc. but our mentality has always been, ‘let’s keep all those good things, but see where we can push and improve.’
Black Ops was phenomenal with high forgiveness and high-launch/low-spin creating distance, but the deep centre of gravity can make it hard to design a super distance-oriented driver for a high-speed player because the CG is farther back.
Our Black Ops Tour-1 was a very low spin model but, once you start seeing low spin across the whole face, crazy things can happen.
So, we wanted to make it more playable, creating more distance and consistency across the face. We knew we had a concept that worked, then it was just a case of ‘let’s iterate and evolve further.’
We see carbon fibre in most woods now, but PXG have a significant amount in the Lightning drivers. How is the addition of that extra material benefitting golfers?
A lot of the technologies we use involve saving weight and redistributing it to optimal areas.
Carbon fibre has a very high strength-to-weight ratio, so anywhere we’re putting carbon fibre on the head, it’s going to save mass while still supplying strength. We can then take that mass and optimize it.
One key part of our DNA as a brand is in adjustability and to do that you need to have a lot of discretionary mass that you can move around through the head. So, by increasing the size of the carbon fibre and really stretching it throughout the sole, it allows for more weight to be moved around in the head. Carbon fibre is certainly an expensive thing to implement, but using it allows us to find new ways to save mass, and we can create more performance for the player.
Part of that adjustability shows up in the loft options available. Is there anything that the engineering needs to account for to achieve this? An 8-hybrid must play differently to a 2-hybrid?
It’s actually a nice thing to go to the higher-lofted clubs!
Because they’re getting shorter, you get more mass to play with; If you look at our specs [in hybrids] they’re progressively 5 grams heavier so we can use that extra mass to dial in the centre of gravity where we want it for each loft.
With Lightning, we’re not just doing the traditional design route, where you design the main SKU – a 3-wood, or a 19-degree hybrid – and then adjust the loft for the rest of the line; we’ve individually designed every model in the line.
We really put an emphasis on that with Lightning. It’s had significant payoffs in performance and been well-received by players that want those high-lofted clubs, like the 11-wood and 8-hybrid.
Another key design, in all the woods, is Frequency Tuning with the new driver face and spined soles. You’ve used the phrase ‘unwanted frequencies’ a lot but how does it add to performance by removing them?
The Spined Sole, more than anything, creates front-to-back stiffness – it doesn’t want to compress quite as easily in that direction and allows us to limit the vibrations that are produced.
Every object has a natural frequency that it’s going to vibrate at, including when you hit a golf ball, but that vibration is generally energy that’s being lost, meaning less efficient energy transfer.
We want to impart as much energy as possible to the ball so, while the face is flexing, we want it to also vibrate at as high of an amplitude as possible. We’re able to gain more speed by having that vibration time up with the golf ball compressing so that it’s leaving the club with as much speed as possible.
That’s where the Frequency Tuned Face comes in. When the golf ball is in sequence with the vibration of the face, everything is moving towards the target in the way we want it to.
It’s led to significant ball speed gains at average club speed and even more at higher speeds!
Finally, PXG’s release schedule doesn’t match the typical one- or two-year plans. Does that bring a different kind of pressure compared to a regular cycle? Can you become too obsessed with perfection?
I don’t think we’re as worried about that. We always want to put everything we’re working on out there, and, if there’s a concept that shows promise but we still need two more years to figure this out, we’re comfortable taking that time.
Equally, if we have a product that we think is phenomenal and is ready to go, we’ll release it as soon as we can.
It’s a great balance from that perspective.
For me, it would be hard to go back to yearly cycles compared to ours, where we get to reset the clock every time we release a product.
It’s the right way to do it, and our product is better because of it.