Ask golfers to name the hardest-to-hit club in their bag, and most will say it’s the 3 wood. This is particularly true for slow-swing-speed golfers. They either hit their 3 wood so low or so inconsistently that many of them no longer even bother to carry one.

TPT’s goal with the Red Range Fairway Wood Shafts was to make fairway woods easier to hit for all golfers. Our team did this by designing our fairway wood shafts specifically for fairway woods and all the shots golfers need to hit with them. It sounds simple, but it’s something the big shaft manufacturers aren’t doing. The manual process they use to manufacture their shafts doesn’t allow for this level of precision.

What we’ve learned with the launch of the Red Range Fairway Wood Shafts is just how important it is for slower-swing-speed golfers to have a fairway wood shaft designed for their swing speed.

TPT Head of Performance Jon Sinclair has been testing the all-new 20 Series and 21 Series fairway wood shafts with slower-swing-speed golfers, many of which have been able to put a 3 wood back in their bag with the Red Range Fairway Wood shafts.

For these golfers, having a 3 wood in the bag they can trust can mean the difference between laying up and going for it. And we all want to be able to go for it more often.

So the question is, “How can a shaft make such a big difference?” The answer is actually quite simple. Golfers can fix their fairway wood woes with a shaft that creates (1) consistent contact and (2) offers a higher ball flight, and that’s exactly what the Red Range Fairway Wood Shafts deliver.

Why Consistent Contact Matters With Fairway Woods

Whether you’re a Tour player or a weekend golfer, you need to be able to contact your fairway woods in a consistent location on the clubface to create consistent results. While contacting shots on the center of the club face is ideal, anywhere around the center of the club face is acceptable so long as it’s consistent from shot to shot.

Because TPT shafts are made with Continuous Fiber, an automated manufacturing method TPT developed to remove the imperfections common in other golf shafts, golfers usually have an easier time finding the center of the club face with TPT — especially once the best-performing TPT shaft model is identified. This is true of both TPT Red Range Driver Shafts and TPT Red Range Fairway Wood shafts, although it’s arguably more important with fairway woods due to the smaller club head size.

When testing TPT against other premium golf shafts, golfers can often feel the difference in the very first swing. The most common feedback is that TPT shafts feel “stable” or “smooth.” That feeling is proving to be even more pronounced with the Red Range Fairway Wood Shafts, and again, this has to do with the way the Red Range Fairway Wood Shafts are made.

Most golfers need their fairway wood shafts need to be heavier than their driver shafts to create the best performance. So even the highest-quality heavy shafts on the market are produced with lower-quality materials and more layers of carbon fiber to increase their weight. More fiber means more imperfections, so it amplifies their inconsistencies.

Why Fairway Wood Shafts Need To Create A Higher Ball Flight

The approach the big shaft companies take to creating fairway wood shafts is to produce heavier versions of their popular driver shafts and hope they work for fairway woods. This makes it hard for golfers to hit their fairway woods high enough — especially golfers with slower swing speeds — as driver shafts are optimized for shots hit from a tee and not shots hit from the ground.

The Red Range Fairway Woods are different in two ways; first, they’re designed to create a higher trajectory than our Red Range Driver Shafts. That step on its own is dramatically improving performance for golfers of all abilities.

The second big difference is shaft quality. The golf shaft industry caters to golfers with tour-level swing speeds and generally puts its best materials into these shafts. The reason why is understandable. High-speed golfers tend to be more serious and are willing to spend more for their shafts. This leaves slower-swing-speed golfers with few high-quality options for their driver shafts and almost no good options for their fairway wood shafts.

You might be asking yourself, “Why can’t I simply use a high-launching driver shaft in my fairway wood to create a higher ball flight?” This makes sense, but in practice we rarely see it work.

Especially for slow-swing-speed golfers, higher-launching driver shafts tend to make consistency worse, which is the last thing golfers need from a fairway wood. Again, this comes down to the quality of the shaft, as well as the inconsistency a golfer will experience when switching from their driver to their fairway wood due to the different shaft feels.

We think it’s ridiculous that golfers need to swing like a tour player to have access to the highest-quality golf shafts. That’s why every Red Range Fairway Wood shaft is created with the same ultra-premium materials (Thin-Ply 2.0) as TPT’s Red Range Driver shafts. If you play TPT, you can know that you have the best in your hands regardless of your swing speed.

We’ll be sharing more in the months to come about the performance of the Red Range Fairway Wood shafts for players of all abilities as we collect the data and continue to do more testing. But for now, we encourage you to do your own testing at your nearest TPT Authorized Fitter.

Ultimately, the truth is in the numbers. And we believe you’ll be very pleased with the numbers you see from the Red Range Fairway Wood Shafts.