Titleist is one of the biggest golf-gear manufacturers out there and the good news for the brand’s aficionados is that the company announced recently their new T400 irons for 2020. Before anything, keep in mind that the T400 will be available for purchase starting with March 27th, so start saving your money until that day. But what’s really cool about the T400 is that they were created for one purpose, and one purpose only: distance driven performance, and beyond.

It's important to mention that the new T400 irons are designed to fill a very specific niche in the company's line-up, i.e. to fill the gap between the T300, T200, T100, and T100-S. Basically, the T400 irons will fill the final spot in the so-called T series, the fifth respectively, and they are crafted to win the hearts and minds (and to spend the money, just kidding) of players with moderate swing speeds (no, these are not Tour irons) who are looking for more distance, greater height and, first and foremost, adequate forgiveness, and yes, this may sound strange for a Titleist iron.

What you must understand about Titleist’s T400 series is that they’ve been engineered from top to bottom to maximize distance at all costs and by any means necessary. Even if that sounds more like a political statement, if you take a look at the irons, you'll see that they're unusually wide from the leading to the trailing edge, working from the sole up; this peculiar wide-body head shape is designed to push the CoG (center of gravity) low and far back, in order to increase launch and boost forgiveness.

Wide body shape has both advantages and disadvantages and speaking of the latter, turf interaction issues may appear. However, Titleist did everything to mitigate turf interaction problems due to a wider than usual body shape, and the answer is a split sole design, which manages to elevate the last 3rd of the sole, in order to avoid the club from bouncing into the golf ball, as well as promoting lower face strikes on firmer turf. Even if this may sound complicated, stick with us: the whole purpose of this design is to make the T400 irons to play similar to the T300, but with added forgiveness. However, Titleist is not the only company to employ this particular sole shape design, i.e. Cobra golf did the same in their King Speed Zone and F9 irons, which means these guys may be up to something, who knows? All jokes aside, here’s an actual quote from an anonymous Titleist employee:

“Look, we already know what people are going to think when they see these loft specs, but they have to consider the target market and what we are trying to accomplish.”

If you are wondering about the tech innovations in the new T400 irons, here’s the short story: besides the CoG placement and face technology, the new irons feature a composite aka multi-material head construction. While it’s perfectly true that hollow heads are nothing to write home about in 2020, hollow composite heads are actually quite new and avant-garde, as they produce an extremely high moment of forgiveness or MOI, that further promotes increased ball speeds, especially when it comes to off-center hits. As usual, bigger is better, and the difference between a regular hollow head and a composite-material one is like the difference between an aluminum tennis racket and an oversized carbon fiber one.

Another tech thing worth mentioning in the new T400 series is the high-density tungsten weighting system. Everybody knows that tungsten is the metal of choice due to its specific properties: extremely high-density mass to volume ratio, and that's why Titleist uses copious (ok, we're only exaggerating for dramatic effect) amounts of tungsten in their new irons, to push the weight to the head for fine-tuning spin and promoting launch. The tungsten weights are positioned to keep the area behind the face open and unsupported, so it acts in a trampoline-like motion to boost ball speeds. And yes, that’s pretty clever. Another tech innovation in the T400 series is basically borrowed from the Titleist U500 and 510 utility irons, and yes, we’re talking about the famous forged SUP-10 L-Face insert. This is nothing more than a glorified face insert, but it uses forged high strength steel, yet it’s less than 2 millimeters thick, and it’s engineered to flex and store/release energy for more ball speed.

The L face design wraps under the leading edge, in order to save mass via removing welds, and comes with variable thickness. Considering the fact that longer irons are built to retain ball speed, the SUP-10 L-Face insert is available in the 5-7 irons, i.e. the T400 series is a match made in heaven for the vast majority of golfers out there looking for a combo set of irons crafted using compact-hybrid technology. Power is nothing without control, hence the stock shaft and grip offering match perfectly the performance goals of the T400 series heads, i.e. they are designed as light as possible for helping with gaining clubhead speed. Here’s the Vice President of Marketing at Titleist Josh Talge speaking about the profile of the T400 golfer (read customer):

“T400 is the super distance Titleist iron. This club is engineered to get the ball in the air and launch it as far as possible, even when the strike isn’t perfect/ There are so many golfers, particularly players with moderate swing speeds, who can benefit from this technology. T400 gets the absolute most out of your swing while still providing the playability of a Titleist iron along with that look, sound and feel that dedicated players demand.”

Finally, as we already told you in the beginning, the new T400 irons will be available starting with March 27th and they’re priced at $185.50 per club ($1,299/set of 7) for steel and $199.50 per club ($1,399 /set of 7) in graphite, with Mitsubishi Fubuki MV IR (graphite, 50 grams) and True Temper AMT Red (steel) shafts as standard.