Hot List 2025: Highest-launching fairway woods
When it comes to fairway woods, designers have been trickling down driver technology such as flexible—even titanium—faces for years in an effort to provide desired additional yards to consumers.
But is that what you really need? It’s not like you’re trying to smoke a 3-wood off the deck to reach a par 5 in two. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even be carrying a 3-wood. Instead, you’re likely using these clubs for approach shots on par 4s or off the tee on par 3s and that means there’s another metric you should be paying close attention to: height.
We know if you can’t get the ball in the air with fairway woods, you can’t hold the green. It’s why one of our five Hot List Vector Ratings for fairway woods is the category of “Launch.” We ask our 32 testers to assign a value of 1 (low) to 5 (high) on each fairway wood hit with the instruction that “Low is below optimal height but with the velocity of a liner back up the middle. High rises surprisingly quickly and floats well above the expected height.”
As most manufacturers offer multiple models of fairway woods within a line, including those specifically designed to foster a higher launch, it is not exactly a shocker that five such clubs were the only fairway woods to earn a launch score of 4 or higher. Typically, these clubs are lighter, have a shallower face height, position weight far back or a combination thereof.
If you’re more concerned with holding the green than rolling over it, consider these five fairway woods that received the highest scores from our testers in launch (listed in alphabetical order).
