SOME things in golf are round. The ball, for example, and the hole. Golfers talk of playing “a round.” At present, however, in the predominantly round world of golf, the new measurement is square.

Square-headed drivers may look like a slice of bread on the end of a stick, but they are suddenly all the rage. They could become the most significant development in the game’s technology in the past decade, combining the lightness of metal woods with a greater strength that means less twisting at impact and a larger sweet spot.

Callaway unveiled the Fusion FT-i last week and several professionals who use their equipment, tried one in practice at the Volvo Masters. Thomas Björn brought his out for the first round before deciding that a course as difficult as Valderrama was no place to be making experiments.

Nike is about to bring out its new driver — the SasQuatch SUMO2 — and Tom Stites, Nike’s director of product creation, promises it will be more advanced than any other.

In the inventive world of golf technology, where developments can be the “in thing” one minute and old hat the next, square-headed drivers would appear to be an idea whose time has come.

They have been known about for decades. Stites says they were talked about at the end of the Second World War and he certainly recalls Japanese clubs of that design in the Seventies and early Eighties. There is a square-headed driver in the museum at the University of Loughborough that Pete Cowen, then a player, but now a leading coach, used to swing as he helped a shaft manufacturer with its research. “It made a horrible noise ,” Cowen said, “and it looked funny. But it helped you line up the ball.”

It is the development of new materials that has enabled square-headed drivers to be brought to the marketplace while conforming to the maximum size of 460 cubic centimetres laid down by the game’s rulemakers. “If we had made drivers like this before and given them to the best players in the world, they would not have been able to use them without them exploding,” Stites said. “But the new materials mean we can make the clubs larger, they can still be hollow and so are easier to hit.

“Our driver is as big as we can legally make it, yet it is so much stronger that its moment of inertia [MOI], the point at which torque generated by the swinging of the club causes it to twist, is much greater. On a traditional driver, the MOI is, say, 4,700. Our square-headed driver will have an MOI of 5,300. In other words, without increasing its size, we have made it seem as though a golfer is hitting it with a bigger club.”

Dr Alan Hocknell, Callaway Golf’s lead designer, puts it another way. “The FT-i has an extraordinarily high moment of inertia, or resistance to twisting, on both the horizontal and vertical axes,” he said. “The club naturally wants to hit straight shots, which is great news for the average golfer.”

It can be imagined what will be said on the 1st tee as a golfer unveils a square driver. “That looks funny,” his playing partners will comment. But, then, they are likely to add: “Can I have a go?” And possibly when they realise how much easier it is to aim at a target, they may want to buy one, too.

All is not completely rosy, however. The ball makes a distinctive noise from the clubhead and it does not travel quite so far. But if a golfer can get his ball on to the fairways more often and thus be playing his second shots from short grass rather than rough, what does it matter?

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

The square shape helps the golfer to aim the club at the target and the bigger clubface increases the player’s confidence of getting a good shot away when addressing the ball on the tee and is more forgiving of mishits

TEST OF METAL
New materials such as titanium and lightweight carbon mean clubs are now much lighter than they used to be yet stronger. This allows manufacturers to make bigger clubheads (460cc is the maximum). More bang for your bucks

WEIGHTING
The shape allows the weights to be positioned much farther back and farther apart in the clubhead than on a traditional driver. In a square head, the weights can be set right in the corners. This increases a club’s resistance to twisting during the swing – known as the moment of inertia [MOI]. The traditional shape is limiting when trying to increase MOI