British Open 2025: Why Scottie Scheffler's driver is missing a common 'ingredient'

Spend enough time inside a tour truck and you’ll hear whispers of “hot melt” tossed around like secret sauce. But for gearheads and tour players alike, hot melt inside a driver head isn’t some mysterious magic—it’s a real, performance-driven tweak that can make a meaningful difference at the highest level of the game.

That said, not every elite player is buying in.

Let’s start with what it actually is. Hot melt is a sticky, glue-like substance injected into the inside of the driver head. Manufacturers use it during production to quiet sound, tweak swing weight or fine-tune head spec. On tour, however, it’s become something more: a precision tool used by reps to subtly manipulate feel, acoustics and performance characteristics—without visible modifications.

Most pros are incredibly sensitive to how a driver feels and sounds at impact. If the pitch is too high or the sensation too hollow, it can kill confidence—even if ball speed and spin numbers are perfect. Enter hot melt. A touch of it in the right spot can turn a “clicky” head into a muted, solid-feeling gamer. It’s not just a sound fix—it’s a confidence enhancer.

Then there’s the performance side. Adding just a gram or two of hot melt in specific internal positions can slightly shift the clubhead’s center of gravity (CG). That might mean moving weight forward to lower launch and spin, or toward the heel for a touch more draw bias. It’s nuanced—fractions of a gram—but those small shifts can help players tighten dispersion, adjust peak height or keep spin in an ideal window.

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Among the improvements here—beyond better overall stability on mis-hits on the heel and toe and high and low—is the increased use of carbon composite in the crown. Now stretching almost seamlessly to the top of the face, the crown saves weight to help increase stability on off-center hits and to lower the center of gravity for reduced spin and better energy transfer. The structure of the channel in the sole now gives more at impact to deliver extra flex to the face for faster ball speed, particularly on lower hits on the face.

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That’s why it’s so notable that Scottie Scheffler, currently the best driver of the golf ball on the planet, doesn’t use any hot melt in his driver. According to TaylorMade tour rep Adrian Rietveld, Scheffler wants “absolutely nothing inside” the head that might alter performance in any way.

“He wants zero hot melt in the head,” Rietveld said. “Zero. It's actually nice to have a fraction of hot melt in the head because it does catch bits of debris in the internal cavity as the club's going through its lifespan. But yeah, there's no hot melt that I know of. He's got a good view on it, right? If [the head] can't be replicated, he doesn't want it.”

In other words, if hot melt is needed to mask how the driver sounds or to straighten out the flight, the head is a no-go. Scheffler doesn't want to conform to the driver; he wants the driver to fit him with no modifications.

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Scottie plays a custom Qi10 “Dot” version of TaylorMade’s Qi10 driver—a tour-only option with lower spin rates in the standard head profile—and pairs it with a Fujikura Ventus Black 7X shaft. It’s already delivering elite-level results off the tee, and he’s unwilling to mess with it.

To him, even small changes could throw things off. The driver is "clean," as Rietveld put it, and that’s just how Scheffler likes it.

It's a reminder that even among the best in the world, setups vary dramatically. Some players lean heavily on hot melt to manipulate ball flight or feel, especially those transitioning between models or trying to bridge gaps in spin and launch. Others, like Scheffler, would rather the head remain untouched, relying on shaft choice, loft and swing dynamics alone.

At the end of the day, hot melt remains one of the few invisible tweaks still used on tour. It won’t get the attention of carbon faces or sliding weights, but in the right hands, it’s a powerful—and permanent—way to unlock performance.

Unless, of course, you're Scottie Scheffler … in which case, less is more.

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