TaylorMade says Qi4D addresses the spin consistency issues that plagued the Qi35. Two years of most requested data and 26 overlapping testers gave us the receipts.
Golf companies have been making performance claims for as long as they can remember. And TaylorMade? Yes, they’ve certainly made their fair share of distance claims before shifting to more forgiveness-focused messages in recent years.
While 2026 and Qi4D promised a return to a more speed-focused approach to driver design, evident in the company’s talking points was no promise of another 10 yards (no one actually says that anymore). It was an affirmation that the significant rotational stability issues that appeared in the Qi35 had been addressed and resolved. With Qi4D, TaylorMade says, you’ll significantly reduce spin variation across the face.
Testable claims are the best kind, so we did that.
How we got here
To understand why this rotational stability stuff matters, you need to understand what happened to the Qi10 and Qi35. TaylorMade went hard after MOI (moment of inertia), the property that determines how much the clubhead resists twisting on off-center shots. High MB is often used interchangeably with “sorry”. And while I would argue that there is much more to forgiveness than MIA, it has nevertheless been the industry standard of forgiveness for years.
with Qi35I would submit that TaylorMade has cooked things up a bit. And to their credit, they’ve pretty much accepted it as well. In pursuit of higher MIA, the Qi35 seemed to give up ball speed, which felt odd coming from a company that has built its identity on being the “distance” brand. This is not the focus of this piece, but it is relevant context.
What is the focus is what happened on the face. TaylorMade’s convenient accounts reported this Qi35 spin rates were all over the place depending on where golfers hit the ball. Hit the center, get a spin count. Subtract a quarter of an inch, get a significantly different one. Hit it up… you see where this is going.
Here’s what makes this interesting from a forgiveness standpoint. MIA went up. By that traditional measure, Qi10 and Qi35 were more forgiving than previous TaylorMade drivers (by a lot), but the spin stability dropped. If you think spin consistency is part of the forgiveness equation (and you probably should), a driver that maintains ball speed on off-center shots but delivers wildly different spin depending on where you hit it is doing half the job. You are maintaining your speed, but your ball flight is unpredictable.
Big picture? This is a tension worth paying attention to as the industry continues to chase MIA numbers.
test
We tested the full Qi4D connection (core, LS, MAX, Max Lite) as part of our 2026 Most Wanted Driver test and the full Qi35 lineup in our 2025 test. Between the two tests, 26 of our testers participated in both years: same people, same test protocols, different clubs, one year apart. While not a perfect comparison, it does give us a rare, paired comparison.
Over the course of two tests, we’re working through approximately 3,800 shots with the TaylorMade drivers and more than 37,000 shots across the course. Every shot we collect includes face impact data from the Foresight GCQuad, telling us exactly where on the face each shot hit and what the resulting backspin was.
As most golfers know, every driver produces more spin when you hit it low on the face and less when you hit it high. This is physics. The question is not whether this happens. The question is how much spin variation there is between impact points.
To answer this question, we looked at three metrics.
Rotation gradient
A measurement of how many rpm the rotation changes for every millimeter you move up or down on the face. Think of it as the empathy key. A steep slope means that the rotation is very responsive to vertical errors. A flatter gradient means the club delivers consistent spin no matter where you grip it. This is the title number.
Area-average spread
We divided each tester’s stroke pattern into three zones—low, center, high—and measured the difference in average spin between the highest and lowest zones. It answers the question every golfer really cares about: how much rpm change in spin should I expect between a low face shot and a high face shot?
R-square
Regression tests tell us what percentage of a club’s total spin variation is explained by vertical impact location alone. If TaylorMade really flattened the vertical spin response, that number should drop; The vertical location of the shock should explain less of the overall spin pattern.
All three metrics were first calculated at the individual tester level and then aggregated as an average. This approach prevents faster swingers (who naturally generate more spin) from skewing club level numbers.
The results
At the risk of spoiling the suspension, TaylorMade’s claim of improved spin consistency stands. And it’s not subtle.
In all four Qi4D modelsthe spin gradient dropped by approximately 50 percent compared to their respective Qi35 predecessors. To put a number on it: the Qi35 Standard had a gradient of 37 rpm per millimeter. This means that a shot hit 10 millimeters lower than the center would spin approximately 370 rpm more than a shot on center. With the standard Qi4D, the same loss of 10 millimeters costs about 196 rpm – almost half the penalty.
The pattern was maintained throughout the lineup. Max Lite showed the greatest gradient reduction at 52 percent. of MAX AND LS were close behind. And it wasn’t just improving averages. The vast majority of individual testers also saw the improvement. IN MAX24 out of 26 testers had a lower spin gradient at Qi4D than in Qi35. This is not a statistical object. This is a real engineering difference that shows up in real swings.
The area average spread tells the same story in more practical terms. On the Qi35 Max, the average difference in rpm between the low cheek area and the high cheek area was 703 rpm. IN Qi4D Maxthat dropped to 404 rpm. That’s roughly 300 rpm of torque change removed from the equation. In all four models, area spread fell between 39 and 50 percent.
In 2025, vertical impact location explained about half of the total spin variation in TaylorMade drivers. In 2026, it explains about a quarter. The remaining variation comes from factors like swing speed and horizontal loss, things that have more to do with the golfer’s swing than where they grip the face vertically. of Qi4D Max showed the largest drop in R-squared: from 0.545 to 0.194, a 64 percent decrease. The vertical location of the shock was transformed from the dominant factor in the rotation change to a secondary factor.
Each of these improvements was statistically significant.
From the bottom of the class to the top
In isolation, you could argue that the numbers don’t really matter. To put this into context, you need to know where TaylorMade stood compared to everyone else.
In 2025, the four Qi35 models ranked 22nd, 25th, 26th and 31st out of 37 drivers on the roll gradient, in the bottom third of the field. Clubs like G440 MAX PING AND Callaway Elyte Triple Diamond were delivering significantly more consistent rotation across the face.
For comparison, in this year’s test, four Qi4D models ranked second, third, fourth and sixth out of 42 drivers. From third to top of the class in a single generation. Just you Srixon ZXi Max it surpasses number 1, barely.
Is the improvement a happy accident or because an engineering team identified a specific problem and threw resources into solving it?
Maybe the latter.
Bringing it home
So what does a more consistent spin actually do for you on the course? More consistent rotation contributes to more consistent results. This is the theory. Here are the data.
In all models and testers, Qi4D produced an average distance consistency of 8.8 yards versus 11.4 for the Qi35. In practical terms, the gap between the tester’s longest shots and shortest shots shrunk from about 26 yards on the Qi35 to about 20 on the Qi4D. That’s six feet short of “what’s he going to do this time?” in every swing.
Three-quarters of testers saw a narrower distribution in distance Qi4D and keep distance tells the same story. The improvement isn’t just showing up in one metric. It’s consistent across the board, exactly what you’d expect if the underlying cause (more stable rotation) is true.
This is the type of improvement you are likely to notice on the course.
Is this an industry-wide improvement?
Another question worth asking: Did the entire industry get better at swing consistency in 2026 or does the data suggest that this rate of improvement is specific to TaylorMade?
Using the same 26 overlapping testers, we compared TaylorMade’s year-over-year gradient improvement to the improvement in all other drivers tested. TaylorMade has improved by 16.5 rpm/mm. The rest of the field? 0.3 rpm/mm.
Basically zero.
This is not the proverbial rising tide that lifts all boats. Data from the 2026 driver testing suggests a specific and targeted engineering fix that appears in TaylorMade’s product and nowhere else in our data set.
I’d be remiss not to point out that if it’s not broken to begin with, there’s no real need for a fix.
conclusion
TaylorMade said they fixed the spin stability issue. The data strongly suggests that they did just that. The improvement is large, is consistent across all four models, shows up in the vast majority of individual testers, and is statistically significant by every measure we applied. TaylorMade went from the bottom third of the field to the top of its rotation consistency in a single product cycle.
This does not Qi4D the ultimate driver for any golfer. Distance, accuracy, other forgiveness metrics and a dozen other factors still matter. But on the specific question of whether TaylorMade addressed the vertical spin consistency issues that plagued the Qi35, the answer is unclear.
They fixed it. And it wasn’t close.
