What do PGA Tour pros Boo Weekley, Vijay Singh, and Jerry Kelly all have in common, besides being exceptionally talented golfers? They all use the Cleveland Launcher driver from Cleveland Golf, designed to produce the long and straight drives with low spin and high MOI .
Look and Feel
The Cleveland Launcher driver looks like your traditional shaped 460cc driver with its pear shaped head, which has one of the largest faces that is 21% larger than both the original Launcher 460 and Launcher Comp. The crown uses thin crown technology to produce a crown that is only a half millimeter thick and features a nice prominent aim line that looks like a rocket ship, which makes setting up to the ball a breeze.
The sole of the Launcher features a horseshoe-shaped weight pad on the rear of the sole to help with providing optimal launch conditions and stability on miss-hits for high MOI and low center of gravity. The Launcher driver comes with a stock 50g 45.5″ Fujikura Fit-On FLIGHTSPEED GOLD series graphite shaft that has been designed to have a stiff butt section that transitions into an active tip section. The active tip section of the Fujikura shaft is what helps produce a high launching penetrating ball flight without excessive flex in the tip of the shaft, like you find in most regular flex shafts.
Performance
On the tee box, the Launcher’s 460cc frame produces a stable and forgiving high MOI head that doesn’t look oversized. So you won’t look like your teeing up with sledgehammer. With a name like Launcher, you’d expect this driver to produce a nice mid-trajectory penetrating ball flight that goes long. The Cleveland Launcher did just that and delivers a nice medium-high trajectory ball flight that pierces through the air and goes a long distance even after the ball lands.
The thin crown technology used in the Launcher took all the weight from the crown and moved it deeper and lower in the driver for improved center of gravity, optimized launch, and maximum distance. This is one way the Launcher produced drives that would carry anywhere from 5-7 yards longer.
The face of the Launcher as mentioned earlier, is 21% larger than its predecessors and designed that way to provide more room for error on miss-hits. The larger face gave me a lot of confidence that I would crush my drive, even if I was a little off in my downswing. On miss-hits the Launcher
would produce drives that were much more straighter, thanks to the horseshoe-shaped perimeter weighting on the rear of the sole.
The horseshoe-shaped weight pad is designed to improve your launch conditions and provide stability on your miss-hits, by lowering the center of gravity and increasing the MOI. In my tests I found that my shots were more accurate, easy to shape, and forgiving on my miss-hits. This doesn’t mean that the Launcher will correct a slice or hook, but your misses will be not as severe and will still go almost as far as drive hit on the sweet spot.
Most regular flex shafts are very flexible in the tip to help launch the ball into the air and produce a spring like feeling at impact. The shaft on the Cleveland Launcher is a lightweight 50g Fujikura Fit-On FLIGHTSPEED GOLD series, that has a stiff butt section transitioning into an active tip section that is not overly flexible and still produces a high-launching drive. You get all the benefits of a regular flex shaft, but without the spring like feeling at impact.
I was never a big fan of the aluminum baseball bat sound that Cleveland Golf drivers made, and the engineers at Cleveland Golf have corrected this in the Launcher. The engineers modified the tone at impact to produce the ideal sound, that is a more traditional ear-pleasing pitch that you’d expect in a driver.
Overall, the Cleveland Launcher is good driver for golfers who want a traditional looking 460cc driver that produces longer and straighter drives, without sacrificing forgiveness and optimal ball flight. Even if you’ll never have the talent of Boo Weekley, Vijay Singh, and Jerry Kelly, you can still play the same driver.
Cleveland Launcher MSRP $299
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
What the heck? This driver is out of production and the new one is already in stores? Why the review now? What about the DST that is in stores?
The 2009 Launcher is one of the best grivers on market. I have had Titleist 909 d2, Srixon Z-RW, Taylormade R9 and a few others and this out-performs them all. I did change shaft from the whippy stock Fujikura to a Grafalloy Blue X-stiff. The results were impressive launch angle with great accuracy. 300 plus drives from a 10.5 degree is excellent. I would recommend this to all handicaps with the advice to change shaft to something that suits your tempo.