PING has introduced the i525.The i525 replaces the i500 as the company’s signature “player’s distance” offering.The irons promise more speed and greater consistency.MSRP starts at $205 per iron. Retail availability starts March 24.
PING i525 Irons
The PING i525 iron is emblematic of the company’s typical no-nonsense approach to design (and marketing, for that matter). With PING, there’s usually not much in the way of fanfare. Occasionally, they give us something we can see—Turbulators and Hydropearl finish spring to mind—but more often than not, PING hides its best work under the hood and under the radar.
It’s the consequence of a Moneyball-like strategy that doesn’t rely on hitting a home run with each new release. Summed up by PING’s Director of Product Design Ryan Stokke, “We don’t find that one design attribute makes a great club.”
With that in mind, it won’t surprise you to learn that performance gains between the i500 and i525 irons weren’t made with a single leap but rather a series of small steps that touch on nearly every aspect of the design.
More Speed
Given that the PING i525 resides solidly in the “player’s distance” category, it makes sense that improving ball speed would be one of the design goals. That’s typically easy enough to accomplish given that the industry has no qualms about adding gaining distance via the bending machine. So the more nuanced part of the discussion is that PING was able to make the i525 iron longer than its predecessor without jacking lofts or sacrificing performance in other areas.
The extra speed comes by way of changes to the construction of the iron. With the i525, a forged maraging steel face is robotically plasma-welded to a 17-4 stainless steel body. The fundamentals of the construction aren’t uncommon in the player’s distance category or even the game-improvement space for that matter.
