Now I Know Why This Is The Best-Selling Preowned Club Of 2025

In the fiercely competitive golf equipment market, where brand loyalty is deep and new models drop every winter, it's fascinating to track which clubs truly capture the attention of the amateur golfer.

Having spoken to our friends at golfclubs4cash to examine the stats, it became clear that in 2025, one club emerged as the undisputed king of the secondhand market: the TaylorMade Qi10 Max driver.

The question is, why are so many people buying it?

I recently picked up my own Qi10 Max from golfclubs4cash for just £287.99, around half what the major manufacturers are charging for their new flagship models. This price tag immediately makes it attractive, but its dominance goes far deeper than cost alone. The consensus seems to be that the Qi10 Max hit a perfect storm of performance features and tour influence that made it irresistible to the average golfer, but what were the ingredients of that storm?

I wondered whether the first reason for its popularity was the immense credibility and confidence built up in the Qi10 range as a whole by TaylorMade's professional staff. Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler spent pretty much all of the 2025 season using a Qi10 driver (albeit a different model), with massive success, ticking off three of the four majors between them.

Seeing this success, wielding the familiar blue carbon face, no doubt built huge confidence in the performance of the entire Qi10 family, with recreational players potentially gravitating towards the Max model for its added forgiveness.

Another reason behind its longevity here could be the fact that it is heavily draw-biased, which is often a significant factor for the vast majority of golfers battling a persistent slice. For those players, having a high-MOI head and a CG bias that actively works to turn the ball over and reduce a right miss is a game-changer.

However, I believe the biggest reason for the Qi10 Max's success may be down to a "happy accident" by the engineers at TaylorMade. When they designed the Max head, they pushed the shape down to create width from front to back to maximize MOI.

In doing so, the hosel naturally moved lower to the ground by around a quarter of an inch. Rather than adding this length back into the shaft (to maintain the traditional 45.75” length of the rest of the range, TaylorMade just let it roll, and as such, the Qi10 Max played a quarter of an inch shorter than its siblings, the core and LS model.

Why is this so crucial? I suspect that reducing the playing length even slightly helps players find the middle of the clubface more often, and this efficiency has significant benefits for both distance and dispersion.

To test this theory, I conducted a simple experiment, bringing along three identical KBS PGW driver shafts, one at 44 inches, one at 45 inches, and the final one at 46 inches.

After a good number of test shots on my Foresight Sports GC3 launch monitor, predictably, the shaft absolutely produced more clubhead speed the longer the length became. However, my average ball speed actually dropped every time I went up in length because I simply wasn't as efficient at finding the middle of the clubface as often.

Interestingly, this was a perfectly linear relationship for me. The 44” driver produced the least club speed, but the most ball speed, while the 46” driver produced the exact opposite, with the 45” option sitting right in the middle of both.

This was fascinating for me to see in my testing, and only served to reinforce the often forgotten rule that centred contact is always king. You can talk all day about angle of attack, shallow versus steep, rotation, and any more endless technical thoughts, but simply put, they are all superseded by the need for centred contact - even with a head as forgiving as this.

The TaylorMade Qi10 Max driver, therefore, offers a unique value proposition: a club backed by tour success, built with maximum slice correction, incredible forgiveness, and a slightly shorter, more efficient playing length that helps the amateur golfer find the sweet spot. It’s a compelling combination that explains why it became the most popular pre-loved club of the year for golfclubs4cash.