Tour Edge Exotics C723 Iron Review
The compact-looking, extreme distance iron is part of the Competition sub-line, hence the C in the name, for serious players. That said, it still features game-improvement elements, such as full-face forgiveness and ball speed along with a pleasing sound and feel. The clubhead is smaller than the previous iteration, boasting a thinner top line and shorter blade length, which should make it appeal to a lower handicap range.
This player’s distance iron is loaded with technology, such as VIBRCOR, which is a TPU that’s injected into the hollow body pocket to provide excellent feel. The impact experience was certainly very addictive, the ball springs off the face with a powerful yet subtle sensation - not too loud or harsh - comparable with the best compact mid-handicap irons.
The Diamond Face VFT comprises 92 diamond shapes of three different thicknesses behind the face that act as mini-trampolines – creating faster ball speed and expanding the sweet spot to the outer areas of the face. So every shot is supposed to feel like you nutted it, regardless of where the ball makes contact with the face.
Speaking of the face, it’s made with a high-strength, military grade maraging steel L-cup Face that’s plasma-welded onto a 17-4 stainless steel body. This helps make way for a significantly thinner face, the thinnest in any Exotics iron ever. It also helps dramatically increase face flex across a larger surface area of the clubface. The L-Cup acts as a hinge that can improve accuracy and protect off-center ball speed, something the best golf irons are able to achieve shot after shot.
At address, it looks like a powerful club with subtle-yet-significant bulk behind the ball. The top line nicely balances the thin-thick line – not too much either way. Hitting the irons honestly took a little bit of an adjustment. It felt like the irons needed to be placed a tad further back in our stance to make solid contact. Maybe that’s because the offset, blade thickness or lie angle was slightly different to our regular clubs. But playing it anywhere forward in the stance produced consistently fatter-feeling shots.
That said, they didn’t seem to lose any distance – and were extremely forgiving in terms of direction, among the most forgiving irons I've tried in recent years. A very strange phenomenon. But when placed a little back in the stance, contact was clean and distance, feel and performance were pretty decent. By the way, the irons were armed with Mitsubishi Tensei 65-gram graphite shafts.
We particularly loved the short irons. Dialling in shots to the target was a thing of beauty and ease - attacking the flag seemed effortless once we got in the groove. They seemed to have the perfect feel throughout the swing and hit the mark just about every time.
