Equipment

Titleist confirms yellow version of its Pro V1 and Pro V1x golf balls is on its way

August 14, 2018
Titleist AVX yellow.jpg

Courtesy of Titleist

A yellow version of the Titleist Pro V1 and Pro V1x golf ball will be introduced in 2019 with the next generation of the game’s most played and top-selling golf balls.

The announcement came Monday on the Team Titleist website—the company’s home for fans of the brand to discuss new products, Titleist staff players and insider information. According to Monday’s post, the decision to add yellow to the Pro V1/Pro V1x lineup was largely fueled by interest expressed on the Team Titleist site.

“We read and shared all of the posts from the community asking for a yellow Pro V1 and our R&D team went to work,” the post reads. “They spent countless hours on figuring out how we could develop the best possible bright colored cover formulation. They went through numerous trials to get everything just right. It wasn’t an easy task but the hard work has resulted in a new offering that we can’t wait to introduce.”

A yellow version of the Pro V1/V1x previously was dismissed largely because Titleist engineers felt the color option wasn’t a particular player demand among its tour staff and core users. And to get the color right and maintain the performance of its cast urethane elastomer cover required more than slapping some yellow paint into the mix. Though Titleist officials aren’t offering any specific details on the new Pro V1/Pro V1x cover formulations, it seems logical that the company will use what it learned in developing the yellow version of this year’s AVX balls (pictured) to produce next year’s yellow Pro V1/V1x balls.

The AVX’s different urethane formulation—“GRN41 thermoset cast urethane elastomer”—allowed Titleist to introduce a soft-feeling, durable urethane cover that also could be formulated in yellow. It was the first yellow urethane-cover ball Titleist has introduced since the Pro V1 first debuted on tour in 2000. Titleist has produced colored versions of its ionomer-cover balls (DT SoLo, NXT, NXT Tour, NXT Tour S, Velocity and Tour Soft) since the DT SoLo and NXT Tour S came in a yellow option in 2012.

By bringing a colored version of the Pro V1 to the market, Titleist joins other major brands with colored versions of multilayer urethane-cover balls, including Srixon, Bridgestone, TaylorMade and Volvik, as well as smaller players like Vice and Snell. Of course, one of the more successful colored, urethane-cover golf ball entries in recent years has been Callaway’s soccer-ball pattern Truvis versions of its Chrome Soft tour ball, which has been available in several colors and custom patterns.

Recent consumer surveys of serious golfers by Golf Datatech show about half of them indicating at least some interest in playing a colored golf ball. The current survey of attitudes and usage of average serious golfers said, “52 percent indicated they are at least somewhat interested in playing a colored golf ball, with 16 percent saying they are very interested. Total interest is close to an all-time high (54 percent in Spring of 2015 was the only time interest was higher). The older the player and the higher the handicap, the more likely they are to be interested in playing a colored ball.” In the biannual survey, yellow was by far the preferred color at 85 percent.

Titleist typically introduces new versions of the Pro V1 and Pro V1x every two years at January’s annual PGA Merchandise Show. The last Pro V1/Pro V1x introduction was in January 2017, although the new versions usually appear on the conforming list of golf balls and on the pro tours during the preceding fall. We shall see if any Titleist staff players decide to go yellow, perhaps as early as this fall.