Scottie Scheffler Switches Back To Old Driver At American Express

Scottie Scheffler has had a much better start to the year than 2025, when he was sidelined with a hand injury following an accident in the kitchen when trying to make ravioli.

This time around, the World No.1 is fully fit and has had a healthy off-season to practice, and it showed with a flawless 63 (-9) to open the American Express.

He did so with his old trusty TaylorMade Qi10 driver, which has been in the bag since early 2024 including his two Major triumphs last year. It marks a change for the Texan, who put in TaylorMade's new Qi4D driver in his last start at the Hero World Challenge.

"Yeah, for me so far this driver's been a really good fit for my eye and that's always the first test for me," he said of the Qi4D last month.

"So far the performance has been good, my spin numbers have been really consistent, ball flight's been consistent and looking forward to getting it in competition.

"So last year I had a little bit of trouble getting into the Qi35 and I feel like we learned a lot throughout that process of what I like to see in a driver, the way it needs to perform for me specifically.

"Going into this year I feel like Adrian [Rietveld, his fitter] and the whole team at TaylorMade had a really good kind of idea of what my eyes needed to see in order for the driver to be able to work.

"We went through a lot of different kind of options for what the face needed to be specifically for me and felt like we're in a good spot, and then the testing was a lot simpler this time around for sure."

He found just 35.71% (5/14) fairways with his trusty Qi10 core dot model in his first round of 2026 to rank 148th in the field, although he did hit 17/18 greens and went on to make nine birdies and nine pars.

"Felt I could have hit a few more fairways on the back nine, give myself some more opportunities," he said after his 63.

"Even the fairways I was missing, I was missing on the correct side. The out of bounds can sneak up on you a little bit on this golf course.

"And it was nice, to, even though I wasn't hitting it my best on the back, but to keep it in play and give myself some opportunities."

Scheffler's Qi10 is a 'dot' head, which is tour-only and lower spinning than the standard driver, and comes in 8° of loft, set at 7.5°.

His clubface is a brighter blue than standard as he "likes the face to pop" according to his Rietveld. He also does not have the standard white banner strip at the top of the face either.

When he put the Qi4D in play last month, he kept the blue face in play - so it's clearly something he is very comfortable with. He ranked 2nd in Strokes Gained: Off the tee on the PGA Tour last season and 1st in SG: Tee to green, as well as many other categories.

The Qi4D line has had an impressive take-up by pros on tour since it was first spotted late last year. Rory McIlroy immediately put it in the bag, as did Tommy Fleetwood, Nelly Korda, Charley Hull and Collin Morikawa.

Jayden Schaper also used it to win back-to-back tournaments on the DP World Tour.