Ping G430 Max 10K driver

Gear: Ping G430 Max 10K driver
Price: $650 with Ping Alta CB shaft, Project X HZRDUS Red Smoke RDX shaft or Mitsubishi Kai’ Li White shaft and Golf Pride Tour Velvet 360 grip
Specs: Forged titanium face and body with carbon fiber crown and adjustable hosel. Available in 9, 10.5 and 12 degrees of loft.
Available: Jan. 9

Who It’s For: Golfers who want to maximize forgiveness and stability and moderate-swinging players who want a higher launch and lower spin off the tee to maximize distance.

The Skinny: Along with having the largest carbon fiber crown in company history, the Ping G430 Max 10K has an exceptionally high moment of inertia to help the club resist twisting on off-center hits to promote longer, straighter drives.

The Deep Dive: Driver prices have crept up over the years, but don’t let the 10K in this driver’s name scare you into thinking it will cost $10,000. That figure, 10K, refers to something else, but this addition to the Ping G430 driver family could be priceless to golfers who struggle with consistency off the tee.

Starting in the mid-2010s, Ping drivers became synonymous with stability and forgiveness, with clubs like the G30, G and G400 Max helping golfers who struggle to find the center of face hit straighter tee shots. With the release of the G430 Max 10K, the Phoenix, Arizona-based company boasts that it has made its most stable driver ever.

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Like other Ping drivers, the G430 Max 10K has a 460-cubic-centimeter volume, which is the maximum allowable size, but dimensionally, from heel to toe and front to back, it is larger than the other G430 drivers.

The crown is designed using carbon fiber, and the material wraps over the edges and into the sides of the head. Ping refers to this design as Carbonfly Wrap, and it helps save 5 grams of weight from the top of the club and lower the center of gravity. Previously, Carbonfly Wrap had only been available in the G430 LST driver.

The G430 Max 10k was designed with a variable-thickness, forged titanium face. (David Dusek/Golfweek)

The driver was designed with a variable-thickness, forged titanium face that has a unique curvature. Although you may not always see it, driver faces curve vertically and horizontally. In the G430 Max 10K, Ping reduced the roll curvature in the lower portion and increased it above the center of the hitting area. This helps normalize spin over a larger area, so low-hit drives don’t have excessive spin and high-struck tee shots retain spin.

The face is also thinner than the standard G430 to allow the hitting area to flex more efficiently over a larger area to protect ball speed on mis-hits.

The weight saved using a Carbonfly Wrap crown and a thinner face has been redistributed into a 28-gram weight in the back of the sole. It is 3 grams heavier than the G430 Max’s weight, and since it is located farther back away from the face, it helps increase the moment of inertia even more.

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The G430 Max 10k’s size allowed designers to push mass far from the hitting area. (David Dusek/Golfweek)

Working together, Ping’s technologies in the G430 Max 10K produce a heel-toe moment of inertia of 5,860 g-cm2, which pushes up against the USGA limit of 5,900 g-cm2. Add in the up-and-down MOI, and the total reaches 10,100 g-cm2, which is why the 10K was added to the club’s name. With that number being the highest in Ping’s history, no driver the company has previously made resists twisting on off-center hits better, so golfers can expect to see straighter shots and less distance loss on mis-hits.

All of that forgiveness should make the G430 Max 10K appealing to golfers who want to hit straighter shots, but during player testing, Ping discovered the G430 Max 10K produced a launch angle up to 1 degree higher with slightly less spin. For slower-swinging golfers, that can mean more carry distance and more overall distance. It also means that fitters can use the adjustable hosel and try the club at a lower loft, which can produce more ball speed and tighter dispersion while still achieving the launch angle that a golfer needs.

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Below are several close-up images of the Ping G430 Max 10K driver: