Lightning has been one of TG\u2019s favorite all-round performers in our 2026 drivers test<\/a>, offering strengths for every level of golfer.<\/p>\n I was eager to find out exactly how PXG\u2019s designers had managed to bring all those desired traits together, so I sat down with Caleb Kroloff, the company\u2019s Director of Research & Development for Woods, to understand more about what sits under the hood to make these woods sing.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s Golfer: Straight into the new Lightning family, Caleb, and the drivers have really impressed in our annual testing. They\u2019re powerful, but also extremely consistent. Was that a focus for the design team this time?<\/p>\n Caleb Kroloff: I would say that it\u2019s always an objective. We\u2019re 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, \u2018let\u2019s keep all those good things, but see where we can push and improve.\u2019<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Our Black Ops Tour-1<\/a> was a very low spin model but, once you start seeing low spin across the whole face, crazy things can happen.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018let\u2019s iterate and evolve further.<\/a>\u2019<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n A lot of the technologies we use involve saving weight and redistributing it to optimal areas.<\/p>\n Carbon fibre has a very high strength-to-weight ratio, so anywhere we\u2019re putting carbon fibre on the head, it\u2019s going to save mass while still supplying strength. We can then take that mass and optimize it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n It\u2019s actually a nice thing to go to the higher-lofted clubs!<\/p>\n Because they\u2019re getting shorter, you get more mass to play with; If you look at our specs [in hybrids] they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n With Lightning, we\u2019re not just doing the traditional design route, where you design the main SKU \u2013 a 3-wood, or a 19-degree hybrid \u2013 and then adjust the loft for the rest of the line; we\u2019ve individually designed every model in the line<\/a>.<\/p>\n We really put an emphasis on that with Lightning. It\u2019s had significant payoffs in performance and been well-received by players that want those high-lofted clubs, like the 11-wood and 8-hybrid.<\/p>\n Another key design, in all the woods, is Frequency Tuning with the new driver face and spined soles. You\u2019ve used the phrase \u2018unwanted frequencies\u2019 a lot but how does it add to performance by removing them?<\/p>\n The Spined Sole, more than anything, creates front-to-back stiffness \u2013 it doesn\u2019t want to compress quite as easily in that direction and allows us to limit the vibrations that are produced.<\/p>\n Every object has a natural frequency that it\u2019s going to vibrate at, including when you hit a golf ball, but that vibration is generally energy that\u2019s being lost, meaning less efficient energy transfer.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re able to gain more speed by having that vibration time up with the golf ball compressing so that it\u2019s leaving the club with as much speed as possible.<\/p>\n![\"PXG](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/pxg-lightning-tour-cowan-driver.jpg\")
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