Titleist GTS300 mini driver: What you need to know
Titleist built the GT280 mini driver to split the difference between a driver and 3-wood—and it worked well enough that Justin Thomas and Cameron Young started asking for more. Not more performance off the turf, but more forgiveness without sacrificing what made the mini useful in the first place.
That's a harder request than it sounds. Add head volume and you typically raise the face and change how a club behaves off tight lies. Titleist's answer is GTS300, a 305cc mini that grows the footprint and pushes the center of gravity back for a claimed 15 to 20 percent jump in MOI over GT280, while maintaining the face height of its predecessor so the turf performance remains the same.
Pricing/availability: Titleist's GTS300 mini driver is available July 23 for $549 (True Temper Project X Titan Black, Mitsubishi Tensei 1K White/Blue/Red) or $749 (Graphite Design Tour AD).
3 Cool Things
1. Forgiveness without the tax: The number that matters here isn't 305cc—it's the fact that face height didn't change from GT280 to GTS300. Volume and MOI usually climb together with face height, because that's the easiest way to add mass high and deep. Titleist went a different route, using a composite crown to free up discretionary weight and relocate it toward the back of the head instead of going taller.
The payoff shows up specifically on shots off the deck.
A taller-faced mini driver is more likely to catch turf on a slightly steep approach or skull one off a tight fairway lie. Keeping face height flat while still having the ability to increase MOI means the added forgiveness on mishits doesn't come with a corresponding tax on shots from the deck.
"The main goal in development was to make GTS300 a more forgiving mini driver," said Stephanie Luttrell, Titleist’s senior director of metalwood development. "The increase in volume and shift in CG gave us approximately 15–20 percent greater inertia. At the same time, we still put a premium on versatility and performance off the turf with this club."
2. Doing double duty: The GTS300 carries the same forged L-Cup face as the GTS fairway woods, a high-strength ATI 425 titanium insert wrapped around the bottom of the face.
On paper, that reads like a standard low-face-mishit fix. In practice, for a mini driver, low-face contact isn't just a bad swing outcome, it's the expected contact point on a lot of turf shots, where the ball is sitting lower and the attack angle is shallower than a tee shot.
That's a detail worth hammering home: A face insert built to retain ball speed on low strikes matters more here than it would on a full-size driver, because a mini driver's whole job description includes hitting off the tee and turf.
Titleist engineers have said as much; the L-Cup work traces directly back to protecting off-the-turf performance, not just protecting a mishit off the tee.
3. A dual-weighting lever: The stock adjustable weight setup places an 11-gram weight in the aft and a 3-gram weight forward. Flip them, and spin and launch come down. That's a two-gram-heavier-in-front swap.
It might feel small on paper, but it's the kind of adjustment a fitter can use to tune a mini driver's launch and spin characteristics.
Justin Thomas is the case study Titleist points to, and it's a useful one for how these clubs actually get used on tour.
He employs the club on courses where the 3-wood wouldn't see much action, which frees him up to game a 46-inch shaft in his GTS2 driver for more raw distance, knowing the mini driver covers the gap on holes where a full driver isn't the play. That's the mini driver category doing its actual job.