Get ready to see a new ball on your TV screens in 2024. The new Callaway Chrome Tour X ball will be in use by a large number of the Callaway staff players in the upcoming season, including Jon Rahm, if the rumours are to be believed.
Part of the new Chrome Tour family, in tandem with the standard Chrome Tour and the reimagined Chrome Soft, Callaway has tried to offer something for everyone in this range to compete with the best premium golf balls.
The Chrome Tour and Tour X will now take their place at the top of the food chain in terms of their performance levels, with Chrome Soft now sitting just beneath them and offering different characteristics.
With regards to the technological advances, Callaway is telling us that a new Hyperfast Soft core has been introduced to give as much speed as possible to the new Chrome Tour X. Callaway has achieved this by implementing a new rubber system whereby a new base polymer has been combined with a mixture of other ingredients to create optimal compressions to produce maximum speeds.
The Chrome Tour X also features a new cross-over dimple pattern of both hexagonal and spherical dimples to create an innovative new dimple design which maximizes the stability of the ball flight.
To talk in feel terms first, the X is noticeably firmer than the standard Chrome Tour. Nothing even resembling hard, just one note higher-pitched and livelier than its sibling.
I tested the Chrome Tour X on full shots against the standard Chrome Tour, the new Chrome Soft and my usual gamer the Titleist Pro V1x using a Trackman 4 launch monitor, and the results were pretty much as Callaway told me they would be.
I saw marginally faster ball speed through the bag with the X version over the standard model and also slightly higher spin numbers. In terms of the data versus the Titleist ball, it was extremely similar. Ball speed didn’t differ more than 0.3mph in any of the clubs tested but with fractionally more spin, while the Chrome Tour X stayed in the air a little longer for me than the Pro V1x, giving me a couple more yards of carry with both my driver and 7 iron. With only two yards and little more than 100rpm of spin difference, on paper it is a very similar ball to the Pro V1x, although I would probably give the edge to Callaway in the feel department.
I really enjoyed testing this ball and seeing the differences in personality to the other premium balls in the family. To me, it feels like the excitable sibling of the Chrome Tour. Its slightly firmer and livelier feel gives it more life, and the extra spin it produces promotes more creativity and flight options. Or, to put it another way, the Chrome Tour is your reliable bank manager friend that will always do a good consistent job, whereas the Chrome Tour X is your freelance artist buddy, full of ideas that thinks a little more outside the box and is your first choice for a night out.
Callaway has done an excellent job in creating a family here that genuinely offers different things without sacrificing important performance markers like ball speed, feel, control and consistency. I expect to see a lot of traction on all global tours with the Chrome Tour X, especially amongst the more creative pros that like to shape the ball.
