For a golf club R&D guy, Mike Nicolette was brutally honest.
This is the time of year when many companies roll out their new “greatest” equipment, a year or two after their last greatest stuff. In 2024, PXG released its 0311 Gen7 irons, which went right up to the USGA limit for C.O.R. (coefficient of restitution), meaning the ball flew off the face as fast as allowed.
“So it’s like, O.K., now what do we do? We cannot make it go any faster,” says Nicolette, the former PGA Tour winner-turned club designer who was among PXG’s first hires in 2013. “Well, there was an opportunity there, based on the design of the Gen7.”
Those irons had some mass in the center of the club, and within there was the secret to the newly released 0311 Gen8, now available at retail and PXG.com.
In pulling the weight from the middle and shifting it toward the heel and the toe, PXG preserved the speed of the Gen7 while adding forgiveness in terms of MOI (moment of inertia).
“That drove the moment of inertia up by about 6%, which in my world is pretty significant,” Nicolette says. “And our dispersion pattern improved over Gen7 by 30%. The ball is so consistent now where it’s landing, it’s like coming down in a bucket.”
Your results may vary, of course, and—you have likely heard this before—getting fit helps. All of today’s clubs, from drivers to wedges, can be custom fit to the player, and the Gen8’s fitting secret-sauce is in the split weighting, or what they call “Dual Perimeter Weighting System.”
The heel and toe weights can be adjusted from two grams to 12 grams, in one-gram increments, which can create noticeable shot-shape changes without altering the club’s lie or loft. For example, more weight in the heel and less in the toe allows the face to come into impact more closed, promoting a draw.
“This gives our fitters one more lever to pull,” Nicolette says. “Typically, in the past, if we wanted to change the directional line, how the ball starts, you do it with lie angle.”
The Gen8 irons have three models: Tour, Players and Xtreme Performance, which are just as they sound. The Tour features a compact head with minimal offset, the Players is the midsize profile and the XP is the wide-soled confidence-building iron.
The irons also come in two finishes: chrome (at $229 per iron) and PXG’s “Xtreme Dark” ($249 per iron).
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as These New Irons Are Designed to Be Dialed in.
