Pretzel

The PIF can increase their investment stake. Outside organizations and even the PGA/Euro Tours cannot do the same without approval from the PIF due to the first right of refusal. They’re a sponsor, yes, but one that explicitly reserves all rights to expand their financial stake and block other investors in the arrangement as it’s been laid out so far to the public. The PGA and Euro Tours are getting their initial financial stake in the merger by contributing their tours essentially, as you mentioned, because the PIF is the only one putting forth cash upfront in the deal the way it’s been described thus far. The issue for those tours is that the announcement specifically states the PIF reserves rights to both increase their financial stake in the created company AND prevent dilution of their financial stake through the first right of refusal. They’re the only ones with those powers, not the PGA or Euro Tour who could at a minimum have their stake heavily diluted or at worst also be barred from increasing their initial investment later on by the PIF itself. The parent company will get the revenue from all 3 tours, and the board will distribute it as deemed best for the company between the accounts payable, future year budgets, and profit for financial stakeholders. The only money that the PGA/Euro Tours would have available to expand their financial stake is their portions of the profits that get reinvested into the company and even then the PIF’s portion of reinvested profits offsets that. The PIF, on the other hand, has $600+ billion dollars of additional investments they can draw from to dilute the initial investment of the two Tours. To clarify, I’m not talking about immediate effects of the merger. They could very well start out with equal financial stakes in the merged company, with the PIF essentially paying in cash what the PGA/Euro Tour have valued themselves at to enter as an equal partner (not likely since PGA and Euro Tours themselves are not equally valuable, but I digress). I’m talking about the effects down the road when the PIF exercises their exclusive rights to expand their initial investment or block additional investors from joining as the financial stake each partner has begins to change. I’d very much like to be wrong about this, but it’s very weird to specifically call out in the announcement that the PIF has exclusive rights to increase their investment AND a first right to refusal for other investors. That’s borderline hostile-takeover merger terms right there.

Correct, the PGA Tour is still effectively running and operating the PGA Tour (as well as now the Euro Tour and whatever may remain of the LIV) in terms of commercial and business decisions. They don't, however, get the profit that results from these decisions except what is allocated based on financial stake in the newly merged company (depending on how exactly the agreements are written up, of course). Their operating expenses will obviously be covered by the Board as they're an operating expense for the merged entity itself, but anything beyond that is a complete unknown right now. The point of the investments and dilutions is that the PIF gets to have the PGA Tour run their company for them, while the PIF collects the profits as the largest financial stakeholder. It's not a disadvantage, at least financially speaking, to have the most successful of the 3 merged entities also be the ones responsible for the business and commercial decisions of the new conglomerate. The board also has a fiduciary duty to place the interests of the shareholders above their own interests, by which I mean they are legally obligated to take actions that they reasonably believe and can defend will have the best financial impact for the conglomerate. The PIF itself also has an obligation to grow their holdings, and having a majority financial stake in essentially every relevant professional golf tour on the planet is a massive win for them regardless of if they dictate the exact day-to-day business operations of the tours. It simply makes far more sense for them to outsource the golf-specific commercial and business decisions to the people who have already made a very, very successful product rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. The PIF doesn't care about micromanaging the day to day operation of the tours, they never have. They don't need or even want the Tour to come out and say anything about Saudi Arabia directly, they just want eyeballs on their product with their brands on display at the highest level of sports. In this case they got to acquire two profitable professional golf tours on incredibly flexible terms, increasing their financial stake whenever they want with no risk of their own stake ever being diluted, and they don't even have to find a qualified team to manage it because the most successful of the tours they acquired will be doing the commercial management for them.

Bingo - even if the new entity starts out with a 33% financial stake for each organization (which is incredibly unlikely given they discuss that the PIF is fronting all of the initial investment money) the fact of the matter is that the PIF has enough money to dilute the financial stake of the PGA/Euro tour immediately without it amounting to much more than a rounding error on their cumulative balance sheet. There is also no way for the PGA/Euro Tour to prevent their financial stake from being diluted in such a fashion, but the PIF does have the right to do exactly that themselves. In other words it may not happen today or tomorrow, but eventually the financial stake in the combined entity will effectively be entirely owned by the PIF. The PIF has purchased both the PGA and Euro tours on an extended payment plan, and as an added bonus they even got the PGA Tour to provide the board members that actually have to successfully operate their new professional golf business. They don’t even have to do much of the work to run it all or figure out how to be successful (since they clearly didn’t have the right answer with the LIV), they just have to sign a check occasionally and collect the profits at the end of the quarter, it’s literally that easy for them!

You read it dead wrong, actually - per the article: PIF (the Saudi investment fund) is the exclusive investor and has exclusive rights to invest more money, including the right to refuse money from other investors. The PGA Tour will appoint a majority of the board that handles commercial operations, but the PGA Tour and DP World Tour will be minority stakeholders in terms of financials and can/will be barred from investing further into the joint entity while PIF is the only one allowed to increase their financial stake.

This is honestly so comical it feels a little bit like the plot from a bad movie. The PGA Tour has spent the last 2 years railing on about how accepting Saudi money is evil and makes you complicit, while defending themselves in court against anti-trust litigation as not being a monopoly because other large organizations like the Euro Tour exist. Naturally, they chose the best possible way to settle anti-trust litigation - just invite the opposing party to merge into a single monopoly with the Euro Tour that you were previously insisting was and would remain a completely independent organization from yourself. Bonus point for the merger creating a single for-profit company when the PGA Tour had previously always been a non-profit organization. Just goes to show that the PGA Tour never cared about the source of the money, they only ever cared that it didn't filter through their pockets first before reaching any players and venues. One thing to note is that the PGA Championship is not hosted or organized by the PGA Tour, it's hosted and organized by the PGA of America (the same organization that accredits/certifies instructors across the country). They are separate entities, so if that was your concern for not watching the PGA Championship it might give you reason to reconsider. The PGA Championship is, after all, by the numbers the most competitive and difficult to win major championship on the calendar.

If you want something with a seat, the ClicGear is definitely the sturdiest of the bunch. I'm a bit lazy, and I don't like having multiple buttons and latches involved in the folding and unfolding process for a push cart so I bought a Bag Boy Nitron. It has one locking lever for the handle height/angle, and that's it. Takes me legitimately 2-3 seconds to deploy or re-fold back up with the gas spring assist mechanism. I've had one of mine for 3.5 years now (bought it early 2020) and have played several hundred rounds of golf with it, and the second one I bought last year when I initially forgot my push cart at my old golf course during a cross-country move and that one has seen at least 50 or so rounds on it. Both of them still working great, only minor problem is on the first one I did catch the fabric pouch under the handle on something once when putting it away in the car and one corner of it tore but that happened in 2021 and it still hasn't ripped any further since to actually cause an issue. My only complaint of any kind would be that it's not quite as stable as some of the lower or wider push cart options like the ClicGear, but realistically I've only been on 2 different courses that had steep enough hills all over the place for it to ever even matter (it still has to be really steep for it to be any concern at all).

It's because the original schedule included the Chinese Grand Prix on April 16th, but that was cancelled due to the continuing pandemic-related restrictions China still has in place. This was likely only included in the schedule due to contractual obligations, and then after it was cancelled the backlash from teams over the amount of races (and the cost to circuits to host a grand prix) meant it wasn't replaced on the calendar with another race. They can't just shuffle the entire calendar forwards to close the gap either because circuits have to plan their schedules well in advance and shifting the F1 circus by a week would ruin all of that (and certainly breech other contractual obligations in the process).

That would be a withdrawal because of back injury, not because of poor play. He shot a 67 in the first round (lowest score of round 1 was a 66) and was even through his 2nd day while many were scoring worse than round 1. They most likely just extrapolated his performance either from that stint as if it was across the entire tournament, or they perhaps extrapolated the R1 performance alone across the entire tournament. The scoring average for Round 1 was 70.9, and the scoring average for Round 2 was ~70.2 (excluding Jason Day's partial score), meaning a performance of shooting 67 + 70 in Round 1 and Round 2 would've been nearly 4.1 total strokes gained relative to the field just from simply a scoring perspective. Strokes gained methodology doesn't perfectly translate into scoring though, and it's likely that he was just really exceptional on approach and tee shots but average performance (bad relative to the rest of his game) when putting that prevented him from scoring well. That or he could've been quite average off the tee or approaching the green, but had miraculously good putting to bring up the strokes gained across a small sample size. It's easy to skew the numbers for strokes gained to be larger with smaller sample sizes than larger ones, because there isn't time for regression to the mean to occur. The closest method I could think of to compare would be to use similar methodology as they used to compare a golfer against themselves year over year. If you can do that, you could measure an average change among all players on years of big equipment releases but it would still have confounding variables since players themselves vary from year to year naturally anyways. Would be interesting to see if there were any trends where the averages spiked noticeably without the inclusion of new players, where the same players in the field all improved dramatically coinciding with the release of some kind of equipment rather than new, better players joining the field to raise the floor.

Two points that caught my eye reading through the article and playing with the charts. It's funny to see that some of the most dominant seasons in golf, at least in terms of what most people would answer if asked that question, of Tiger in 2000 and 2001 are actually only his 5th and 10th best seasons from '96 to 2015. Sucks to be Greg Norman with 9 years, including two stretches of 3+ years in a row, as statistically the best player in the world and still only have 2 major championship wins to show for it. To expand on comment #2 there, most other players on the list of top annual ATPI players won at least one major within 1 or 2 years of being the top annual ATPI player. The only other exceptions to that pattern are Tiger Woods (in his 2012/2013 stint on top), Lee Westwood, and Luke Donald. I'm sure there are some data limitations preventing them from going back even further in time for calculating these index values, but it is a new approach that seems to do the best job yet that I've seen of comparing past players to more modern ones. It gives the correct previously measured and known result as well, which is that modern players simply play golf better than players of the past. If you have a certain level of dominance over a field of better golfers, you yourself are a better golfer than the person who had the same level of dominance against fields of weaker golfers. What I would be most curious to see, however, is if there's any similar method of comparing things that would allow you to see how much of the improvement in fields and top golfers is due to equipment (clubs and balls) versus simply being better players/athletes (whether that be a result of more competition, more knowledge, better training methods and resources, etc.). I can't think of any particularly rigorous method off the top of my head that would allow this, but it's a neat thought experiment.

Just look at the video from his putts on the previous hole and on the tee when he was hitting there. You'll see whether or not the ball he hit off the tee had a black arrow marked on it, unless there was no camera near the tee box the current cameras used are quite sufficient to show whether or not his ball was indeed marked that way.

Without a cross-handed grip it's surprisingly difficult to keep your chest closed to the target line at impact. Turns our your right hand (for a RH golfer) has to be closer to the ball than the left, and the easiest way to do that is with a slightly open chest. Who would've thought?

As others mentioned, the actual replacement should be easy with the only "hard" part being trying to figure out which way to install the adapter on it so that the shaft graphics are facing the way you want them once it's installed in the club. You don't even need to buy a new adapter, if you have a heat gun or a propane torch then you can use that to remove the adapter from your current broken shaft without any worries of ruining the shaft by overheating it because the shaft is already ruined anyways! Only thing I would mention to be careful of is to make sure you buy the 5-minute epoxy and not 24-hour epoxy, or at least be well aware if you do end up using the 24-hour epoxy. With just an adapter to attach onto the shaft 24-hour epoxy is easy since you just set the shaft tip-up until it sets without having to worry about affixing both clubhead and shaft in place while it sets. I once made that mistake with some iron shafts and set the up with 24-hour epoxy in the morning (didn't pay attention to which bottle I used), went to go play a round that afternoon and sent a clubhead flying on the first teebox before realizing my mistake.

I don't play in Chuck Taylors, but when I was in Colorado and the weather was dry I'd play pretty often in just a pair of Puma running/tennis shoes that were my general purpose everyday shoes. When I was in Virginia I quickly learned the grass never dries out enough there for the full fabric construction to not end up soaked after even just a few holes, but for golf in arid desert climates they work just fine. Kept me from swinging out of my shoes since doing so would mean spinning out since I had no spikes and only a minimal tread pattern, even shot the best round of my life (a 63) while wearing them. That's about the only thing I can't find fault with in that video anyways.

One thing to note is that I’m not trying to be insulting to the caddie in my earlier comment. I’ve paced off the vast majority of putts that weren’t a tap-in that I’ve hit over the past ten years or so, and I can also say with absolute certainty that 99% of those “measured” distances were an under-estimation. I know this because the steps I use when pacing off a putt are almost always a little longer than 3 feet apiece to be able to comfortably keep a consistent length to each step. It doesn’t really matter because I’m not ever comparing the measurements using my step length to measurements made by other people’s step lengths. It would matter if I was using it for that, but I only use it for comparison against myself. Asking caddies and/or players to do the measurements without the help of a tool is like asking people how far you have to drive to get from one place to another without using a map, you’ll get good estimates from people who do it a lot but they’ll still all be a bit different because nobody can measure perfectly without the help of tools.

Definitely would make sense, particularly with the strokes gained putting being such a huge factor at more than a stroke lost each and every round. Self reported data is a terrible way to track these types of statistics, for exactly this reason. They’re only possible on the PGA Tour because of ShotLink, so trying it without such a system in place is a fool’s errand.

Oh absolutely, soft spikes almost always worked better in wet conditions than metal ones simply because they gripped the grass more than the soil. I had sets of both in my bag that I would swap out depending on the course/tournament, and would usually use the soft spikes if it was actively raining or just really soggy outside. Most of the time, however, it was very dry with firm ground since I grew up playing and competing in and around Colorado, which meant the metal spikes were usually better traction since they gripped the firm soil itself rather than just the grass. I don't know if it's that I grew up with better and more modern shoe sole designs or just that I'm still young, but I never actually noticed my feet hurting after wearing metal spikes. I did avoid walking on paved or concrete surfaces in them though, but that was to avoid drawing attention to the metal spikes more than anything else since they're noisy (and slippery too). In softer conditions it's no contest, the spikeless shoes are FAR better than either soft spikes or metal spikes on any of the shoes I've had in the past (all FJ Icon, Premiere, or similar previous models). In super hardpan soil, like compacted cart path kind of firm, then metal spikes grip better than spikeless or soft spikes. In the standard range of playing conditions, however, I'd rate modern spikeless shoes as having the most grip, metal spikes having a little less (in moderately firm soil areas), and soft spikes as having the worst grip. They've got enough tooth to the pattern to get a little bit of purchase on the soil itself in anything but the hardest packed earth, and since the pattern covers the entire sole (more surface area and higher count of individual teeth) you're less likely to have a slip caused by a single spike tearing out of a weak point in the grass/soil and causing a chain reaction since all the other spikes suddenly see increased pressure that causes them to similarly tear out. I'm a full convert nowadays, so much so that in my last cross-country move (I'm up to 3 now in 2022 alone) I actually just threw away my last 2 pairs of spiked golf shoes since I never used them anymore and their waterproofing had started to degrade. Despite being a lifelong user of the "classic" hard-soled spiked shoes I will probably never again buy another pair, at least not so long as these hard-sole spikeless variants remain available and as effective as they are today.

Not sure if you're completely dead set on spiked shoes or not, but I'll share my experience and 2 cents anyways. I always used spiked shoes while growing up and competing, and whenever a course didn't specifically prohibit them I would use metal spikes for the extra traction. I know there's lots of debate around metal spikes specifically, but I felt they gave the best grip and I wouldn't wear them inside of clubhouses and took care to avoid damaging greens when using them (most of the bans were due to the clubhouse issue in truth). Last fall I was in need of a new pair of shoes and a rewards program through work gave me the chance to order a pair of the FJ Premiere shoes for free. I've always used the FJ Icon or similar style shoes since I've got fat feet that don't fit inside most athletic-style golf shoes (4E-6E width depending on brand), so I ordered them and didn't notice until they arrived that the available shoes were the spikeless variant. I was honestly really disappointed since I figured the shoes would be pretty useless to me considering I'm used to spiked shoes with whatever the most aggressive spikes a course allowed installed on them. I was, however, very pleasantly surprised by the grip that the shoes had. I actually have gone so far the other way as to PREFER the grip of the spikeless shoes, especially in wet conditions where spikes can "slip" and tear out because of softer soil conditions. I truly do believe that the tooth pattern on the Premiere spikeless actually has more grip than any spiked shoe I've ever used, the only downside is that when playing in wet conditions the tooth pattern will gather mud/soil that you should dig out with a tee but that's no different than any spikes I've used (and they gather less loose/tangled grass than spikes ever did). I'm a convert so long as FJ keeps making shoes with the same tooth pattern, or similar ones that are equally effective.

I don’t know how to share a saved beat from GarageBand or even how to save a beat on my phone, but if you use the beatpad and turn the metronome on (it’s highlighted blue in the screenshot) this is similar to what I was thinking of. I couldn’t make the beat longer than a single measure so in this example the tempo bpm is used to set the full start to finish duration of the putting stroke (i.e. a bpm of 60 means start of backswing to impact with ball takes 1 second). It has 3 lead-in beats and then the 3 different beats to signal start of backswing, start of downswing, and impact with ball. Here’s what it looks like, should take about 10 seconds to set up yourself if you have the GarageBand mobile app and can find the beat pad (hit the button in the top left that looks like a grid). Alternatively if you want faster lead in beats that give you a better sense of how long the backstroke should be, just add in extra lead-in beats to the 3rd portion of each beat like in the photo below. The lead-in beats for the first example are spaced a full stroke length apart. So if you were swinging the putter back and forth repeatedly you'd hear the lead-in beat once every time your putter passed the bottom of the stroke (where you'd be hitting the ball, approximately). The second example you'd hear the lead-in beat twice per stroke, once at the bottom of the stroke and once at the end of a stroke (forwards or backwards) if you were swinging the putter back and forth repeatedly.

Not sure how Garageband works exactly since I don't think I've ever used the desktop version and know I haven't used the phone one since the iPhone 4, but if it allows you to compose based on measures and then adjust tempo independently this would be the easiest way to make something similar that's auditory (no flashing lights) and works similarly (assuming you're going for a 2:1 tempo ratio and using a 4/4 time signature): 1 measure of lead-in clicks, one per beat 1st beat of 2nd measure is a different and distinct sound from lead-in clicks Silence for 2nd beat of 2nd measure 3rd beat of 2nd measure is your downswing start click 4th beat of 2nd measure is your ball impact click 2-3 measures of silence for you to reset Then you can adjust the tempo of the playback on the whole if you want a faster or a slower overall tempo while keeping the same rhythm to the putting stroke (that 2:1 backswing/downswing ratio), and you can set playback to loop. I can mess around with Garageband this afternoon now that I have an iPhone again and see if I can make something others could borrow/steal/use.

Honestly if they used some D20's to randomly choose both tire compound and how many laps until the next pit stop, I think they might have been better off than they were by letting their strategy team make the decisions. The problem is that the strategy director, Iñaki Rueda, has been in the same position making the same terrible decisions since 2014. The fact that he has outlasted the revolving door of team principals (Domenicali, Mattiacci, Arrivabene, and now Binotto) despite the fact that the majority of failures during that timeframe can be directly attributed to his team is nothing short of astounding. I can only imagine the kind of dirt he must have on various members of Ferrari leadership to not be fired by now, and it has to be someone either higher up than the Ferrari CEO or it has to be a variety of Ferrari individuals because he outlasted both Marchionne and Camilleri (previous Ferrari CEO's). The worst part of it all is that his undergraduate engineering degree is from the same University as mine! He's tarnishing my own credibility a little more with every successive blunder!

The season started off really entertaining with good battles, just sad that it ended up relatively boring by the end. One thing that seemed really noteworthy to me, however, was the amount of improvement Mercedes was able to make across the course of the season. They went from nearly 1 second per lap behind the top cars to scoring a win purely on pace in the 2nd to last race of the season. I know they had lots of issues with porpoising early on that hampered them, but despite having started as the 3rd fastest car and still ending as (generally) the 3rd fastest car they win the "Most Improved" award in my book, since they went from barely better than the rest to barely slower than the 2nd best despite there having been a huge gap between the midfield and the top-2 teams initially. I'm very curious to see if they're able to further tame the "zero sidepod" concept that other teams considered to be too risky and take it further than other design concepts, or if it might stall out as other teams continue to progress. Either way I'm still quite happy to see that by seasons end there are still 3 distinct design concepts competing to see which of them is the best way forwards. The zero sidepod concept from Mercedes, more "traditional" take by Red Bull, and the bathtub sidepods of Ferrari. I expect Red Bull to still be fastest come next spring, but I'd be very pleasantly surprised if Ferrari or Mercedes made a big leap forwards with their designs (particularly Mercedes since a lot of their comments alluded to their primary problem being one they can't solve until next year's car due to the homologation rules). It will also be as interesting as ever to see how the midfield sorts itself out again now that the first year of the new regulations has been completed, whether we'll see teams continuing their own concepts or copying the big-3 teams' designs. Especially with three new rookie drivers (Piastri, Sargeant, and De Vries) it will be fun to see lots of fresh faces further down in the order (or perhaps higher up, with the right development luck). Shame about Mick Schumacher losing out on his seat, but realistically from the outside it's hard to say how much value he brought both financially (sponsorships that might be associated with the Schumacher name, especially now that he was dropped from the FDA) and in terms of car development. Most young drivers don't have the same car development talent in particular as more experienced ones, but at the same time there's only so much an experienced driver pairing can do with a Haas as we've seen in the past.

Honestly the biggest surprise to me of Singapore was the complete lack of either penalties or warnings for both Mercedes drivers. Lewis re-joined the track right in the middle of a battle for position without a care in the world for whether it was safe to do so or not, and Russell's collision with Mick was baffling considering he turned out into a car that was driving perfectly straight rather than Mick even beginning to turn in.

So right off the bat, ignoring everything wrong with how he's defining the moment arm for calculating MOI and the fact that your wrist and elbow will never be stiff enough to count your arm and shaft as one continuous member, he's very confused about the fundamental physics behind what he is saying. The moment of inertia of the clubhead about the axis of rotation created by your spine/shoulder (what he's referring to here) is entirely irrelevant to the collision between ball and clubhead. Moment of inertia is the resistance to change in angular momentum, he got that correct. If you have a higher moment of inertia about your spine's axis of rotation it means the angular momentum of your swing will experience less change than it would if the axis of rotation was on the same angle and plane but smaller diameter (such as locating the axis of rotation at your wrists). The thing is, a smaller change in angular momentum still equates to the same change in linear momentum because angular momentum is also proportionate to the radius of the rotation. Let's assume, for the sake of easy math, that the clubhead is 1kg, the short radius is 1m, and the long radius is 2m. This means that I1 = m * r^2 = 1, and I2 = m * r^2 = 4. Now we're going to assume equal clubhead speed in both cases, which is a linear speed rather than angular velocity, of 45 m/s or about 100mph which can be converted with the formula V = r * w. For the short radius w = 45, and for the long radius w = 22.5. The kinetic energy of the clubhead in both scenarios is the same, because it is the same mass traveling at the same speed, which is KE = 1/2 * m * v^2 = 1,012.5 Joules in this case. The angular momentum of the short radius clubhead is L = I * w = 45 and the angular momentum of the long radius clubhead is L = I * w = 90. From here we have three options for determining what happens when we hit a golf ball. We can calculate the club-ball interaction using linear momentum which makes the angular momentum crowd unhappy because they think we should be talking about angular momentum. We could also calculate the club-ball interaction using angular momentum in which case we already screwed the pooch because we didn't include the motionless golf ball's mass or lack of velocity in our earlier inertia and angular momentum calculations and it also involves some nasty cross products because the ball's launch angle is not perfectly orthogonal to the axis of rotation. Finally we can calculate the club-ball interaction using kinetic energy, which makes everybody unhappy because I'm ignoring stupid momentum pedants entirely since kinetic energy readily converts between rotational and linear frames of motion. Naturally we're going to choose the kinetic energy route, both to piss everybody off and because we happen to know the exact coefficient of restitution of this particular ball-club interaction. The USGA specifies a maximum coefficient of restitution of 0.822 for the collision between ball and clubhead following the equation below (the epsilon is your coefficient of restitution): We also know that the initial and final total kinetic energy of the system (ball plus club) is equal to the following equations: And finally we know the impulse (dp, delta-p, whatever you want to call it) for both the club and the ball will be equal and opposite to one another, because they are both experiencing an equal force (in opposing directions) for the same duration per Newton's Second Law. From 4 equations, you can derive the loss of the system's overall kinetic energy based on initial velocities and the coefficient of restitution as shown in the equation below: For our system m1 - the clubhead - is 1kg, m2 - the ball - is 0.04593kg, and v1i = 45 m/s while v2i = 0. This leaves us with a total kinetic energy loss of 0.782% Thus the amount of kinetic energy lost from our original system total of 1,012.5 Joules is 7.91775 Joules for a final total kinetic energy of 1004.582. Due to the COR limitations the golf ball, if struck perfectly, will have an initial velocity of 67.5 m/s (~150mph) and will thus have a kinetic energy of 104.634 J, leaving a total kinetic energy of 899.948 J for the clubhead. That equates to a final clubhead speed of 42.425 m/s. The astute among you may have noticed by now that the angular momentum or moment of inertia of the clubhead about the axis of rotation is not mentioned anywhere in these equations for calculating the final clubhead speed or the final speed of the ball. That's because it doesn't actually matter - we know the COR of the collision, we know the initial speed of the club and ball, and that's all we need. The only thing that matter is how fast your clubhead is moving. Both clubhead and ball experience the same amount of force regardless of lever length, but the torque applied by that force to the system with a longer lever length is larger because torque is also proportionate to momentum. So what you gain in increased resistance to change of angular momentum is later lost because the longer lever means an equal force will create a larger change in momentum. In conclusion, everybody is unhappy now because we all had to deal with systems of equations and I ignored momentum entirely in the process of proving that talking about momentum in the golf swing is stupid.

Yeah, he got enough of a head start. I was counting Max among those of the next generation, he's just the only one among them to have won a WDC so far.

After Max's performance today it seems pretty clear how much on a different level he really is from the rest of the field in terms of driving ability. Starting from P14, admittedly in the fastest car, he still ends up winning 18 seconds clear of his teammate. His teammate didn't have any kind of strategy disadvantage (pitted whenever was optimal for him, same tire strategy as Max and didn't have to cover for any other cars) and appeared to have the same spec of all parts on the car as Max. The only drivers we've seen come close to this type of performance in the last 20 years would be Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher. Not even Vettel or Alonso really had that kind of pace difference from their teammates, and Max has had that large of an advantage over every single one of his teammates since he hit his form in 2019 (and even in 2018 Ricciardo only truly had better races than Verstappen in Australia and China). Gasly, Albon, and Perez have proven in other teams that while they may not have been on the same level as Hamilton/Verstappen, they were among the best of the remaining drivers in the field rather than simply middling performers buoyed by sponsors or outright pay drivers. Gasly and Perez are both race winners in midfield cars while Albon has managed to drag that Williams this year far beyond anyone's expectations. It's fun to watch, at least at the moment, but it does start to make one wonder if we're in for a run of Red Bull and Verstappen dominance until the next big shake-up in 2026 similar to Mercedes from 2014-2020. It's always fun to watch a driver with historic talent like that, but when they're in the best car cruising to victories from anywhere on the grid we all know how stale it can become. I'm hoping other teams are able to put together improvements to make their car (or strategy team) a worthwhile challenger for the Red Bull at least, and then we'll have a better idea of how the best of the next generation (Leclerc, Norris, and Russell) stack up against the obvious talent of Max.