Estoril Open de Portugal
The latest stop on the European Tour schedule brings us to Cascais, Portugal for the Estoril Open de Portugal held at the magnificent Oitavos Dunes. The course is situated on Lisbon’s Atlantic coastline which normally ensures a stiff breeze and the potential for fast changing weather conditions. The course is not overly long by European Tour standards at just under 6900 yards but trouble is easy to come by as the majority of fairways are bordered by gorse covered sand dunes. Keeping it out of the dunes is essential for any player looking to contend this week, I can tell you first hand that they are not the place to be!!!
The big story of the week has again been the new Titleist Pro V1 and Pro V1x with yet more players making the transition into the new ball. As we reported last week in Seville a whole host of players have already made the switch and many more are currently testing the ball. Here is a list of the players to make the switch this week in Portugal.
NEW ProV1
José Manuel Lara
NEW Pro V1x
Daniel Vancsik
Estanislao Goya
Jean-Francois Remesy
Jean Van de Velde
Ricardo Gonzalez
Paul Waring
Jean-Baptiste Gonnet
Francois Delamontagne
Wil Besseling
John Mellor
Stuart Manley
John E Morgan
Birgir Hafthorsson
The Titleist Tour Support Vehicle (TTSV) is in attendance for this week’s event and Titleist Tour Technician Mattias Jelver has been particularly busy working on new drivers for a number of Titleist players. One such player is hard-hitting Englishman Paul Waring. Paul has been using a prototype Titleist 907D4 driver for some time but, in the presence of the new 909 drivers, couldn’t resist heading out to the range to test some new options. After spending an hour with Mattias and the Titleist SureFit system Paul went away with a brand new 909D2 8.5° fitted with Mitsubishi Rayon Fubuki 73 X-Flex shaft and, as the picture shows, was pretty excited about it.
Click here to view the slide show.>
Another player back in the TTSV this week was Spaniard Carlos Del Moral. Carlos is in confident mood following a strong finish at last week’s Open de Andalucia in Seville and, having carried out some driver testing last week was back for more at this week’s event. We documented in last week’s blog that Carlos had a new 909D3 to test and following further testing this week has another option in his armoury; a 909D2 8.5° fitted with a Mitsubishi Rayon Diamana White Board 73 X-Flex shaft. Del Moral is certainly a player who enjoys experimenting with new equipment and with a couple of different 909 options to choose from will undoubtedly be having some fun on the range in the coming weeks. In addition to telling you all about Carlos’ new drivers we thought you might also appreciate a look at his new flatstick. Check out the slide show for a look at Carlos’ personalised Scotty Cameron T10 Select Newport 2 ordered as a back up to his usual gamer. Nice!!!
Young Englishman Seve Benson was another player to spend some time working with Mattias and the Titleist SureFit system this week in order to establish his optimum 909 driver spec. Seve is currently 9th in driving accuracy on the European Tour but was looking to find a few more yards from the new 909 product. Following a successful fitting with the Trackman system, Seve found a driver which gained some valuable extra yards without sacrificing any of his usual accuracy. Seve has taken away a 909D3 8.5° fitted with a Mitsubishi Rayon Diamana Whiteboard 73 X-Flex shaft.
Next week sees the European Tour take a week off as the world’s best head out to the legendary Augusta National for The Masters. The first major of the year will be hotly contested and a number of Titleist Ambassadors will go there with high hopes of claiming the famous green jacket. We wish our guys well!!
Add comment April 3rd, 2009
