© Ping Golf

The Ping G Fairway Wood falls into the game improvement category and it retails for $270. What’s remarkable about this piece of golf gear is that’s incredibly easy to achieve liftoff for the ball. Also, this baby delivers low spin rates, which translates into improved distance. Ping’s new G Fairway Wood was built and designed for closing the gap between how pro golfers and amateurs are using their fairwoods by making it easier to get the ball in the air whilst keeping low spin for great distance. Basically, with the Ping G Fairway Wood, we will see more and more golf players considering going for the par 5s in 2. In terms of appearance, the Ping G Fairway Wood sits perfectly at address when in “neutral position”, while the footprint has a triangular shape, not exactly small to be honest, with a matte black crown and the company’s proprietary Turbulators technology. At ball impact, the Ping G Fairway Wood produces a sort of crack, fairly quiet that is, rather than the metallic ting you’d expect in a regular fairwood, while the feedback is great, both in terms of sound and feel, which helps a lot with how you dial in your shots. This baby comes with a stock Alta shaft, which is counterbalanced for offsetting the heavier head, but since the overall weight of the shaft is lighter, there’s never too much weight in your hands after all; also, you can always opt for the Ping Tour Shaft.

When Ping’s R&D department designed the G Fairway Wood, their main task and the most difficult one actually was to mitigate the most common difficulty with regard to fairway woods, i.e. getting them airborne. And they managed to address the problem by lowering the leading edge, making it easier for the players to contact the ball higher on the club’s face, leading to higher launching shots. Other notable features of the Ping G Fairway Wood are forgiveness and low spin, which translate into longer carry and total distances. Low spin is critical here, as a high-launching fairway wood with high spin will fail at creating long shots. Bottom line, with the G Fairway Wood, Ping hit the sweet spot, creating a club that will clearly dominate its category, just like its kin the G Driver, being incredibly easy to launch and combining great distance with forgiveness like no other.