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By Steve Pike
TaylorMade-adidas Golf continues its familiar Burner series with the newBurner 09 iron, which it call "the most dynamic looking, best performing iron" ever to bear theTaylorMade name.
The Burner 09, according to Sean Toulon, TaylorMade's executive vice president of innovation,features a"futuristic" blend of curves, angles and lines andis completed with a dark sinister finish.
"Our performance goal was to create an easy-to-launch iron that delivered 'meaningful distance,'" said Toulon. "We wanted to make sure that every club was consistently longer than the club before it, and that the distance gaps between each iron are even, because it doesn't help if you hit the 6-iron 15 yards longer than your 7-iron, but only hit the 4-iron five yards longer than the 5-iron.
"Meaningful distance also has a lot to do with control. Extra yardage with your irons doesn't mean anything if you're missing greens with crooked shots or hitting low bullets that skip hard and roll over the back. To deliver meaningful distance, the Burner 09 irons had to promote high, straight, long-carrying, soft-landing ball flight."
Toulon said TaylorMade's R&D team began the search for "meaningful distance" with long-irons.
"We felt that if we could make a long-iron that was far easier to hit than any other, we'd learn a lot about how to make the middle- and short-irons easier to hit, too," said Dr. Benoit Vincent, TaylorMade's chief technical officer.. "We spent a great deal of time in the beginning deconstructing conventional long-irons and re-thinking how we might reconstruct them in a new and different way.We realized that tweaks weren't enough, that we had to redesign the club completely. We realized that each grouping of irons – the short-irons, middle-irons and long-irons – had to be treated separately and differently, because each one is a different animal."
Vincent said TmaG accomplished its long-iron goal with the Burner09 iron bythinning the clubface as much as possible to make it more flexible and faster for higher COR (coefficient of restitution);incorporating Inverted Cone Technology into the back of the clubface to promote increased ball-speed on off-center hits;Increasing the size of the head by expanding the perimeter, which helps increase the MOI (moment of inertia) to a higher level than any previous TaylorMade iron;Increasing the width of the sole (unusual for a long-iron) to pull the CG (center of gravity) location low and far-back away from the clubface;increasing the degree of offset to make it easier to square the face at impact;thickening the top-line to give the appearance of more mass behind the ball at address;outfitting the ironwith a lightweight, longer-length shaft and lightweight grip.
"The result blew us away," said Bret Wahl, TaylorMade's senior director of iron development. "We created a 4-iron that's as easy to hit as our Rescue clubs and which promotes greater accuracy. We applied these same principles to the 3-iron and 5-iron and got the same result, and that's how we succeeded in what are by far the easiest-to-hit long-irons that we've ever created."
The new Burner 09 irons will be available beginning March 20 in sets thatinclude 4-iron through attack wedge. Burner 3-iron, sand wedge and lob wedge are also available.The manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) for a set with steel shafts will be$840; MSRP for a set with graphite shafts will$1,080.
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