Titleist’s Pro V1 is the widely acknowledged gold standard for ball performance, yet for the golfer who hankers after the best and not the rest, how willing is he to pay the requisite premium price for such top-of-the-line performance?

Therein lies the great divide which Titleist now addresses with the new Tour Speed golf ball, born out of last year’s mysterious EXP-01, the project prototype that has led to the Tour Speed’s new thermoplastic urethane (TPU) formulation, a ball geared towards distance with little loss of greenside spin, and priced more comfortably for the budget sensitive seeking to squeeze the most performance out of each dollar spent.

While still primarily a urethane cover ball, not all urethane covers are the same. At the top of the Titleist ball pyramid sits the Pro Vi, Pro V1x and AVX with their thermoset cast urethane covers, generally acknowledged as the best performing and most expensive to manufacture. A level below sits the Tour Speed with the carefully formulated TPU cover for near Pro V1 performance, but not quite enough to cannibalise Numero Uno.

How does Tour Speed differ from the Tour Soft? The latter is Titleist’s softer feeling two-piece ball with an ionomer cover that doesn’t quite generate the spin numbers of either thermoset cast or thermoplastic urethane. It therefore sits a rung below the Tour Speed performance-wise.

Tour Speed’s three-piece design is a new high-speed core formulation combined with a fast ionomer casing layer for maximum speed and low long game spin for category-leading distance. This is further enhanced by a new 346 quadrilateral dipyramid dimple design that provides a penetrating, consistent flight.

Titleist says Tour Speed is faster and longer than Callaway Chrome Soft, Bridgestone Tour B RX, TaylorMade Tour Response, Srixon Z-STAR, and Srixon Q-STAR TOUR. This number of competing models alone explains how large the market is for this category of golf ball, reason enough for the introduction of the Tour Speed.

Said Michael Mahoney, Vice President, Titleist Golf Ball Marketing, “Our golf ball scientists and engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths in the development of Tour Speed – testing numerous core formulations and aerodynamic patterns while formulating and analysing hundreds of TPU cover blends – to deliver on the promise of superior performance and quality.”

Scott Cooper, Titleist Golf Ball R&D’s lead implementation engineer for Tour Speed added, “All of the data and golfer feedback we’ve collected has been clear: Tour Speed is consistently the fastest, longest, and most preferred golf ball among the competitive urethane-covered products in this category.”