Sports
Inside a TaylorMade Qi4D driver fitting with Rory McIlroy’s fitter: WATCH
If you haven’t had a chance to watch Episode 1 of the TaylorMade Tour fitting experience with Adrian Rietveld, I would encourage you to watch it here. The video will give you an appreciation for the level of detail Tour fitters provide to ensure that any club they put in a player’s hands is done so strategically.
Like a world-class chess player, a great fitter (like Rietveld, who fits Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood, among other stars) will make strategic moves to poke and prod a player into the right setup. It’s a craft that takes years to perfect and, no, it’s not a “who knows the data” contest — it’s a listening and watching contest. Great clubs help but I’ve seen the best fitters overcome shortcomings of certain products.
After our fitting (which you can watch in the video below), I asked Adrian to give me a synopsis of what he discovered fitting me for the first time. I left The Kingdom that day thinking the process went well but it was important to me to get an honest take from the man himself. It’s not often that a fitter will sit down and journal his thoughts after the fact so this was a unique opportunity to get in AD’s head.
I hope you learn a lot from what he wrote below — it’s insightful stuff.
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Inside Johnny Wunder’s TaylorMade driver fitting
by Adrian Rietveld, TaylorMade Senior Manager PGA Tour
As a fitter, what I learned about Johnny is that he’s incredibly athletic but also seasoned in years with deeply ingrained habits. For that reason, I deliberately avoided anything overly technical or instructional during the fitting. My role was purely to optimize the equipment to match his exact physical characteristics, swing traits and swing tendencies — no more, no less. When giving instructional advice, I only went as far as tee height.
I made a conscious point to take Johnny as far as possible away from his typical miss. This approach immediately settled him, removing any anxiety and helping him trust the club in his hands. Johnny’s standout strengths are his exceptional ability to generate speed and — perhaps even more impressively — his capacity to repeat his swing with an extraordinarily high level of accuracy and consistency. In all honesty, that’s a club fitter’s dream: You know precisely what you’re working with. His strengths in finding speed and repeatability allowed me to understand impact and club geometry so thoroughly that we could essentially eliminate his weaknesses before the fitting even began.
TaylorMade Qi4D Custom Driver
SHAPED FOR SPEED
The re-engineered head profile increases ball speed thanks to improved aerodynamics developed through advanced simulations.
FACE FOR DISTANCE
60x Carbon Twist Face™ is a technological cornerstone that provides weight savings, incredible ball speed and more consistency vs. a titanium face.
ADJUSTABLE PERFORMANCE
4° loft sleeve can be used to adjust loft, lie and face angle for optimized flight.
TOUR PROVEN TECHNOLOGIES
New and improved cut-through Speed Pocket™ protects ball speed and reduces spin on low-face strikes.
Advanced CAD modeling creates a design with a clean and powerful sound, a foundation of TaylorMade driver performance.
Multi-Material Construction allows engineers to strategically place mass in areas of the head where it maximizes performance, speed, and stability.
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To be honest, the fitting went better than I expected. Johnny is already a strong player using top-tier equipment, and he’s had plenty of high-level fittings in the past. The competitive side of me went in believing I could uncover some marginal gains, but I knew it would depend on identifying what truly mattered to him and steering those improvements in the right direction.
What exceeded my expectations was that every parameter in which I hoped to find even small edges ended up delivering exponential improvements. I could read it in his body language and see it in the ball flight early on. We achieved such strong results so quickly that I actually had extra time to further refine things and explore multiple viable options. That’s a fantastic feeling as a fitter: You have a fixed window, and normally you’re racing to maximize it just to reach the best possible outcome. In this case, I could use the full time not only to optimize but also to give Johnny genuine choices — building his ownership and confidence when he steps onto the course.
A few key achievements stand out. First, we completely eliminated his one-directional miss. From a scientific perspective, that effectively widens the fairway and creates a much larger margin for error. That reduction in directional variability builds confidence, which in turn unlocks more speed and overall performance.
Fully Equipped
Second, we didn’t reinvent the wheel. Johnny was already comfortable with certain club parameters — like grip, length and swing weight — so I kept those familiar elements intact and focused on subtler adjustments he wouldn’t necessarily notice visually, such as lie angle, face angle and center-of-gravity location. These tweaks delivered big results without disrupting his feel.
Third — and this had perhaps the most impact — I leveraged the technology in the TaylorMade Qi4D driver (often referred to in fittings as a standout in its class). The driver delivers exceptional spin-rate consistency across the entire face. This allowed me to confidently put more loft in his hands without the penalty of excessive spin.
Johnny historically has played extremely low-loft drivers because he’s spent years trying to manage and suppress spin. For the first time, spin deviation is no longer a concern — he can rely on the head’s performance to keep things tight and predictable. That product characteristic was a huge asset in this fitting; it gave me freedom to optimize so many other variables without fear, making the entire process exceptionally rewarding. In my view, this spin consistency is likely the primary reason Johnny will choose this driver over anything else he’s tested. The speed was an added bonus.
The Final Result:
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TaylorMade QI4D (Core) 8 degrees
Weight: 2X 9g back, 2X 5g forward
FCT sleeve: Set to upright at 61-degree lie angle
Swing weight: D4
Shaft: Fujikura Ventus Black Velo+ 6X Tipped 5/8 @45.25 EOG
Grip: Golf Pride Tour Velvet 58R 2 DBL Side