It has been a crazy few weeks in my house. My work life got crazy, I got Covid, then Texas had a freeze that shut everything down. Its been a crazy 3 weeks but for the first tiem I was able to get my hands on the Stealth.

Looks

The biggest and most striking feature of the club is obviously the bright red face. Taylormade talks a lot about the 60 layers of carbon fiber. From address the face does stand out and actually works a little bit of an alignment aid. I dont mind the way the red face looks. The only thing I dont like is all the black on the face. Make it solid carbon fiber with the little bit of black mesh. Dont give me all the ripple waves and shit. At address the club sits beautifully. The face on this thing looks massive. It has the shape of the SIM but with a much deeper face. I was a big fan of the appearance. It is probably my favorite looking club at address from Taylormade since the M5 Tour.

Feel/Sound

These things are super subjective so take that with a grain of salt. What sounds bad to me could be music to your ears. What feels awful to me could be great to you. Just remember that. Another thing to remember is that sound = feel.

Going into this I was concerned with the sound that this club was going to make. Carbon fiber is notorious for being very quiet. It makes an almost *thud* sound. To a lot of guys that sounds “dead” so they dont buy it. For years guys on tour have been using something called hot melt to tune in the weighting of the driver but also to give the club more of a thwack sound.

To my ear this sounded like a hot melted club. Like I said I was worried it was going to sound dead. It wasnt loud like a titanium driver but it wasnt bad either. You could tell it had some pop. As far as feel everything felt pretty good. The feedback was actually pretty low. I couldnt really tell where on the face I hit it. With my PING I know if its high toe, low heel, or dead nuts in the middle. I like that feedback.

Performance

Now that we got all the subjective bits out of the way how did it perform? Before I tell you what I saw I do need to add a few caveats. My PING is about half an inch shorter than the Stealth so that could account for some of these results both good and bad.

The biggest thing Taylormade is promoting with the carbon fiber face is more ball speed. When companies promote more ball speed it automatically raises red flags because ball speeds have been regulated since ’05. I say all of that to say that I actually saw some noticeable ball speed increases. On average I saw an increase of 3 MPH. It wasnt hitting numbers I had never seen with the PING but tonight it was on average 3 MPH faster. The fastest PING was the second or third fastest Taylormade. I was amazed. It also launched higher than the PING but that could be down to shaft.

Now the distance and ball speed were better. There is a but though. I was hitting it much further left. The forgiveness of the Stealth wasnt great. The Stealth was much harder to keep on line. It was a little bit of a trade off. The ring of the PING was much smaller than the Stealth.

Final Thoughts

Lets be honest, After the way Taylormade did me dirty during the launch of this product I didnt want to like the Stealth. The truth though is that it is pretty damn good. It is a fast driver. It kept the ball speeds up across the entire face. I was really impressed.

The big question is if this is the industry changer that Taylormade is promoting it as. Are we moving into the Carbonwood era? The answer is unanswerable right now but I guarantee you after testing this a bunch of other manufacturers will at least do some testing on a carbon face driver. The most important question for the consumer is: “Is the thing worth $600?”. To me, its not a $600 upgrade over the PING. The extra 4 yards of carry isnt enough to make me have a conversation with my wife. If you havent upgraded in a while it needs to be considered in your testing.