How Does Temperature Affect Golf Ball Performance?

Every golfer knows that horrid, ringing sensation that runs through your hands when thinning a wedge on a frosty morning. Six months later, there’s the effortless distance that seems to come naturally in the middle of the summer on a boiling hot afternoon in July.

But how much of that is the golfer, and just how much distance are we gaining or losing based on the temperature of the golf ball?

To find out exactly how much you need to be clubbing up in the cooler months or potentialy taking less club in the summer, I took it upon myself to head over to the Golf Monthly Performance Lab using a Foresight Sports QuadMax launch monitor to crunch the numbers with hot, cold, and room-temperature golf balls.

The goal was to quantify exactly how extreme temperatures manipulate spin, launch and speed across three different ball constructions - the 2-piece Titleist TruFeel, the 3-piece Srixon Q-Star Tour, and the 4-piece Callaway Chrome Tour X. Each ball was tested with a pitching wedge, 7-iron and driver at three temperatures: Cold (5°C), Room Temperature (17°C), and Hot (50°C).

Where Should Your Short Game Thrive?

Being able to preempt spin and launch is paramount to being able to shoot lower scores, particularly with your scoring clubs (wedges and short irons). While there are many external factors to consider when playing onto a green - slope, firmness, and grass type, to name a few - believe it or not, the temperature of your golf ball could be playing a big part in how it performs too.

In order to keep the balls as cold as possible for the test, each dozen balls was left in the fridge overnight until they were about to be hit. The same was done with the golf balls left in the oven at 50°, taking out each dozen only when they were ready to be hit immediately.

In cold weather (5°C), the 4-piece Chrome Tour X generated 7,883 rpm of spin with a pitching wedge, however, when heated to a blistering 50°C, that same ball jumped to 9,983 rpm.

A nearly 2,000 rpm difference is absolutely huge and could easily be the difference between having your ball dancing around the pin or landing and scuttling towards the back edge, leaving you with a troublesome two-putt.

The 2-piece Tru Feel experienced an even more drastic transformation. At 5°C, it produced just 4,466 RPM, but at 50°C, it nearly doubled to 8,791 RPM. While it’s more than likely golfers will face softer conditions when playing in cooler temperatures, this kind of spin differential is something that simply cannot be ignored.

Not only will you see a huge difference in how the ball reacts on the green, but I also noticed changes in its flight and launch when conducting this experiment.

The cold temperature will naturally harden the ball's cover and core, limiting the friction and deformation of the ball through impact required to generate backspin. Conversely, in the heat of summer, the ball cover will likely soften, allowing the grooves to grip better.

Not only does spin climb with the increase in temperature, but the launch angle actually flattens out (the Tru Feel's launch dropped from 30.5° in the cold to 26.5° in the heat). While 4° doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s a fairly big difference in ball flight and will make judging the ball flight and therefore distance fairly difficult.

The Mid-Iron Winter Distance Tax

Moving into the 7-Iron was where I really started to see just how much the temperature was affecting the carry distance of each ball.

At our room temperature baseline of 17°C, the premium Chrome Tour X carried a respectable 179.3 yards. When subjected to the 5°C cold test, carry distance plummeted to 170.2 yards, which is pretty much a club less for me, with my 8-iron yardage hovering around the 168-yard mark. This straight away backed up that feeling of needing to club up in the winter months here in the UK.

The 3-piece Q-Star Tour followed a similar trajectory of lacking distance when the balls were chilled at 5°. Dropping from 179.9 yards at room temperature down to 173.9 yards in the cold.

Interestingly, the 2-piece Tru Feel was the outlier here, actually maximizing its carry (180.7 yards) in the cold, compared to producing just under a yard less when tested at room temperature. This is likely due to the lower compression rating of this ball, resisting the extreme hardening that affects how multi-layer balls perform.

The old ‘club up in the winter ’ adage is something that I feel, for the most part, was proven correct during my experiment. I would put money on the fact that the majority of three-plus layer balls would react in a similar way to the Q-Star Tour and Chrome Tour X when faced with a 12° Celsius drop.

The next time you’re out on the course in the winter, make sure to give the ego a check, take a club more, and I guarantee you’ll start hitting more greens.

Unexpected Results From The Tee

Now this may be the part of the experiment that actually surprised me the most. When standing on the tee box in the summer, it feels like every bunker that’s typically out of reach is suddenly in play and that the ball travels forever. While we’ve already proven temperature affects how far a ball is going to travel, our test proves this is only true up to a certain point.

As expected, the cold weather killed driver carry. Much like with the irons, the ball is likely not compressing and exploding as designed, and crucial yards are left on the table.

The Q-Star Tour carried just 273.5 yards at 5°C, but jumped 10 yards to a more than respectable 283.5 yards at 17°C. However, when we baked the balls to 50°C for 2 hours, distance actually decreased with all three of our test subjects compared to when hit at room temperature.

The Chrome Tour X peaked at room temperature, delivering a massive 168.5 mph ball speed and 294.1 yards of carry. Yet, at 50°C, ball speed dropped to 165.6 mph, and carry fell to 287.1 yards - a loss of 7 yards was certainly not what I was expecting.

The Q-Star Tour (283.5 yards down to 279.6 yards) and TruFeel (282.0 yards down to 280.1 yards) both suffered the same fate when overheated, but why is this the case?

I can only assume it’s much like when the golf balls were chilled, and therefore the core and layers don’t perform as initially designed. However, this time around the golf ball's core is becoming too soft.

The powerful smash at impact with the face of the driver requires the ball to compress and rapidly rebound to generate maximum ball speed. At 50°C - a temperature easily reached inside a car during a summer afternoon- the core softens, failing to provide the deforming and explosive energy transfer needed to maximise distance.

Look After Your Balls

While all golf balls from the outside may look the same, there’s a reason manufacturers spend billions of dollars every year looking into layering, covers, and dimple patterns to make sure they perform year-round.

However, after this experiment, there’s no denying the golf ball reacts drastically differently depending on its temperature, and that’s something worth noting if you’re someone who enjoys testing themselves on the course in all conditions.

While ground conditions will have a big say on how far the ball is travelling from a total-distance standpoint, knowing roughly where your ball is going to land will have a big impact on how close your ball ends up to your intended target.

I think it’s safe to say that if you want to optimize your scoring year-round, you must manage your golf ball's temperature. While this is admittedly impossible to keep on top of while actually on the course, hopefully the above data will at least help you prepare for making adjustments when selecting what club you will hit off the tee or into the green depending on what time of the year you’re playing and the conditions you face.

There are, however, a few things you can do to help get your round off to a more predictable start.

When gearing up for a game in the winter, remember to pack your mittens and a beanie hat, but most importantly, bring your golf balls inside overnight as opposed to leaving them in the garage. Starting your round with a room-temperature ball will preserve your driver distance and help maintain wedge spin when needed.

Vice Versa, in the heat of summer, stop storing your golf bag and balls in your car, where they have the opportunity to bake for hours, if not, days on end. Once again, bring your equipment inside to stop that bleed in ball speed and distance off the tee.

Keeping your golf balls at room temperature is where I believe you have the best chance at producing repeatable carry distances and predictable results when your ball hits the green, giving you the balance of distance, speed, and control.