The Making of TaylorMade's RocketBallz 3-Wood

Benoit Vincent is speed-walking through the research and development department at TaylorMade-Adidas Golf headquarters in Carlsbad, Calif. The equipment manufacturer’s chief technology officer has been talking nonstop for two hours about recent breakthroughs in the perpetual race to increase the distance a human can hit a little white ball. Now he’s offering a tour of the facilities where the company molds prototypes and continues to test the hottest golf club on the market, the RocketBallz 3-wood. For a weekend duffer, it’s the equivalent of getting a peek at the secretive creative process that begat the iPhone.

We zoom by rows of product engineers, their cubicles littered with mangled equipment, careen past lawyers awash in patent applications, and finally approach a lab secured by a combination lock. Vincent, a 52-year-old expat who received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the French university INSA, presses a series of buttons and turns the handle. No luck. He thinks for a moment and tries again. Same result. “The code changes all the time, so the chances of me getting it right are … There are millions of dollars worth of products,” he says sheepishly in a lilting accent. “It’ll be easier just to knock.”