What We Tried
TPT Nitro 15 LO. A relatively new premium shaft from Swiss manufacturer TPT. The Nitro features what TPT describes as optimized fiber placement that works to reduce weight and torque while increasing power and precision.
Yeah, we tried a golf shaft.
Your TPT Tester: Tony Covey, once-reformed shaft ho always just one review opportunity away from falling down the rabbit hole … again. And here we go.
About TPT
TPT might be new to you. It’s not really new but, by industry standards, it’s still a relative newcomer to the shaft world. The main point of differentiation for TPT is that while every other shaft company rolls shafts by hand, TPT’s is a fully automated machine-wound product.
This video should help explain the process.
TPT says its continuous winding approach yields a more consistent product which, in addition to providing tighter dispersion, allows golfers to enjoy a speed benefit by using shafts that are softer than what they’d typically play.
That combination explains how TPT arrives at its claim of straighter and longer drivers.
The fitting process
In a perfect world, I would have been able to do an in-person fitting but the timing didn’t work. Instead, TPT put me in touch with fitter Jon Sinclair. At his request, I grabbed some data with my gamer and sent it his way.
Sinclair recommended (and built and sent) the TPT Nitro 15 Lo. The recommendation wasn’t particularly surprising. When I did my GT fitting at Titleist, we got a good sense of the profile and balance point that worked for where my swing was at the time. As we kicked around possibilities for more exotic alternatives (I’m such a toolbox), the TPT Lo was on the short list of suggestions.
There is a fitting tool on the new TPT website, and I suppose it’s refreshing that it also recommended the 15 Lo as well. If it’s your only option, online fitting is better than nothing but if you can get fitted in person, do it.
Shafts are expensive (the Nitro is really expensive) so you really want to get it right the first time.
The initial experience
My TPT shaft arrived the day before I drove to Massachusetts for a deep dive on the new Pro V1 and a ball fitting. Not having a chance to try it beforehand, a more sensible person might have left it at home.
I am not a sensible person so I pulled my gamer out, screwed the TPT shaft into the head and hit the highway.
I’m glad I did.
It’s not the slightest exaggeration when I say that, during my ball fitting, I hit some of the longest and straightest drives I’d hit all season.
Love at first swing. Can I get an ambassador deal? All in, all at once. I think I might get my Tour card.
Honeymoon effect? Maybe. Don’t care.
Reality check: I don’t think there are many guys on Tour these days who struggle to hit 100 mph clubhead speed and TPT shaft or not, I can still top a drive with the best of them.
Still, I really liked it.
On-course and in the lab
Before we get into the testing and data portion, I want to be transparent about the fact that the TPT shaft arrived half an inch longer than what I was gaming. Normally, given that part of the review process is a comparison, I probably would have cut it down to match what I was playing. That said, there are few absolute rules for this sort of thing and, frankly, I was so enamored with how I hit it during my ball fitting that I found myself very much in an “I’m not changing anything” mindset … so I didn’t.
But then …
I did change the grip for my last round of the season but that grip is under embargo so I don’t have much to say about that.
The current state of my game
It’s a mess.
My speed is down significantly. If the driver wobbles out of the gate, the whole round can be a struggle. The upside is that I’ve never hit my irons better – a weird place to be. My home course is tight so I live and die by the driver. Anything between the high 70s and low 90s is in play.
Golf is fun (at least that’s what they tell me).
A bit more background
With the driver, most of us are chasing distance and souls have been sold for a few more yards. The thing is that I play on a particularly tight course and while it has taken me way longer than it should have to figure it out, I’ve wised up to the fact that, first and foremost, I need to paint between the lines with my driver. I’m not going to walk away from an extra yard or two but I’ve got enough confidence in the rest of the bag to believe that if the driver stays in play, I’m going to be all right most of the time.
That idea of painting between the lines is, in no small part, how I ended up in the HZRDUS Black. My core numbers (ball speed, launch, spin, descent angles) were solid given my speed (or lack thereof) but the difference maker was that it took the soft-right miss out of play.
So, with any new shaft, TPT or otherwise, I wouldn’t want to put that back in play but if I could minimize the high-left miss, all the better.
It would also be nice to take the topped ball and smother-hook out of play but there’s only so much we can expect a shaft to do.
So how did it go?
With the TPT on course, I was as close to comfortable as I’ve been with the driver all year. I played all of my best rounds of the year in a five-week stretch with the TPT in the bag. I will tell you, without concrete evidence, that I hit some of my longest drives of the season, too, although, admittedly, my long ain’t what it used to be.
Did I hit some bad drives? Hell, yes. It turns out I’m still plenty capable of the memorably atrocious but I also managed a 72-plus-hole stretch where I didn’t hit a single ball OB.
That’s absolutely unheard of in my world and I’d gladly give away five yards of distance, maybe 10, if I were sure it would last.
A handful of rounds isn’t a huge sample size but the anecdotal takeaway is that, with the TPT, I was as long as I’ve been all season and straighter than I’ve been since I stopped speed training.
The data
I’m not sure how helpful data from a single golfer is when it comes to helping you choose new equipment but I wanted to grab some anyway and see what I could find in the numbers.
For this test, I hit roughly 60 balls with each shaft over the course of a couple of garage sessions. I collected head and ball data with the Foresight CG Quad and I used the same Titleist GT3 head for both shafts. As noted above, the TPT shaft is about a half inch longer (roughly 45.5 inches) and the grips are different.
I took a reasonably light-handed approach to filtering outliers which means keeping plenty of the less-than-perfect stuff that I’m likely to hit during a round of golf.
Looking at the core metrics, head speeds are similar, suggesting that half an inch doesn’t make too much difference (at least not for me). As a sad little aside, in the summer of 2023, I was averaging close to 110 mph. I’m down a solid 10 mph and while that’s a story for another day, suffice it to say that life comes at you fast.
Despite the similar head speed, ball speeds are faster with the TPT and the efficiency numbers (Foresight’s version of smash factor) suggest I made better contact.
The TPT Nitro Lo launched a bit lower with a 130-plus rpm more spin on average. All of that gets me about 3 1/2 more yards.
That’s not world-changing distance but I’ll take it.
In most cases, I was more consistent with the TPT as evidenced by smaller standard deviations.
Looking deeper at the stuff that matters most to me (Foresight’s accuracy metrics), I saw better (tighter) dispersion with the TPT Nitro Lo. Dispersion numbers are useful but can also be influenced significantly by one or two balls that aren’t necessarily outliers but also aren’t tight to the rest of the pattern, either.
Digging deeper, my gamer was slightly more consistent front to back (range), but Foresight’s Spray metric (left to right) shows a wider pattern as well. Neither shaft suffered from the right mis but the pattern suggests a bigger left miss with the gamer but a more left-favoring pattern overall with the TPT.
It’s impact, not magic
What gets lost in how golfers (and some reviewers) talk about shafts is that there’s no magic to this. That is to say, shafts aren’t like knobs that allow you to dial up ball speed and dial down spin.
Very simply, a shaft influences how the club moves through space and how you impact the golf ball. With that, we often find shaft changes produce bigger differences in dispersion than we do with things like speed, launch and spin.
So to try and understand what was influencing the downrange differences, I took a look at how I was delivering the clubs with each shaft.
- My attack angle was a little over half a degree more positive with the TPT.
- I delivered the gamer slightly more closed to the target and the path.
- My path was slightly more out-to-in with my gamer.
- Vertical impact was functionally identical with both shafts (one millimeter of difference) but horizontal impact was more centered with the TPT.
- Because TaylorMade says it’s important, I looked at closure rate and found negligible (50 degrees per second) differences between the shafts.
- Notable: nearly every metric was more consistent with the TPT.
The bottom line is that when combined into a series of golf shots, the collection of small delivery differences seems to favor the TPT Nitro 17 Lo for me.
But why?
Is it the design of the shaft, the extra half-inch length, the manufacturing process or is it as simple as me just feeling more comfortable with the TPT?
The shaft profiles are similar so we’d expect reasonably similar results – and I’d say for the most part that’s what I saw.
Ultimately, the why doesn’t matter. Go with what works.
A quick word about feel
It wouldn’t be a shaft review without some mention of feel. Frankly, I think describing shaft feel is often a nonsensical pursuit. Boardy, kicks like a mule, ball comes off face like rocket, etc., etc., etc. I’m not sure how meaningful any of that is to anyone but for the sake of making my contribution to the noise, my adjective of choice is lively.
The shaft has an energy and while at best that’s relative, I suppose it just feels like the shaft is bending and twisting how I need it to.
Wrapping it up
This is my third experience with TPT shafts. I loved the original on the golf course (it helped me paint between the lines). I played that one in a PING head but somewhere along the way, I got fitted into something else, PING changed its adapters and, well, it’s probably sitting in the basement somewhere.
When TPT released the Red Range, I tried a few different models but nothing felt quite right so it didn’t make it into bag.
The Nitro might just stick. It’s a long winter here in the Northeast but unless somebody fits me into something too good to not play, there’s no reason the TPT won’t be in the bag when the snow melts, although there’s a good chance I’ll trim it a bit.
Specs and pricing
While TPT doesn’t take the conventional approach to weight and flex, between the HI and Lo series, you’ll find 13 options that span a range of trajectories and weights.
Unlike most of its competitors, TPT offers dedicated lines of fairway wood shafts. I’ve been playing the POWER RANGE fairway wood shaft in my 3-wood. While the specs aren’t identical, the recommendation is to play the same TPT profile (in my case, 17 Lo) in your fairway wood as your driver.
That’s a conversation for another day but suffice it to say, I’m happy with what I’m seeing so far.
Retail price for the TPT Nitro range is $650. Power Range driver shafts retail for $380. Fairway shafts are $350.
Given the cost, I can’t recommend getting properly fitted enough.
For more information, visit tptgolf.com.
The post We Tried It: TPT Nitro Golf Shafts appeared first on MyGolfSpy.
