Jeffrey D. Patrick

TaylorMade thinks an invisible issue might be sending some of your golf shots offline, and no, it’s not your swing. During robot testing at the Kingdom, the company noticed golf balls with identical construction flying very differently. Same launch. Same speed. Some flew as much as 20 yards apart. The culprit wasn’t the core or the cover. It was the paint. Traditional painting can drip or pool inside the dimples, creating subtle inconsistencies you’d never see with the naked eye but that can absolutely affect aerodynamics. “Painting was not a precision process,” TaylorMade’s Mike Fox told me. That discovery led to “Microcoating” on the new 2026 TP5 and TP5x. TaylorMade now controls everything from paint flow and curing temperature to how the paint atomizes as it dries. The goal is to make every ball behave like the last one you hit. It matters for Tour players, but it matters for amateurs too. When you hit what feels like a good shot and it darts off unexpectedly, confidence disappears fast. The paint overhaul is paired with real performance changes. TaylorMade digitally simulated more than 100,000 ball constructions to land on new designs, with testing showing about 1 mph ball speed gains. TP5 gets a larger core and a new dimple pattern for a lower, more penetrating flight. TP5x tweaks its mantle layers to stay fast and low spin. Rory McIlroy and Collin Morikawa have already switched. At the end of the day, it’s a simple trade. You can live with your misses, but nobody wants a golf ball that doesn’t do the same thing twice.