TaylorMade P770 vs PING i240: one of these is a set, the other is two clubs

Short answer. Buy the PING i240 if you want one iron model to cover 4-iron to pitching wedge and your problem is control and gapping. Buy the TaylorMade P770 as a full set only if your long irons will not get airborne and you refuse to look at a wider sole — otherwise buy two or three P770 long irons and blend them into something else. That is not a fudge, it is how the clubs are actually used by the people who get fitted for free.

Both models are in play at Bernardus this week, which is what prompted this. Leona Maguire plays the PING i230, the i240's direct predecessor, as a set that runs from the 7-iron down. Nelly Korda and Charley Hull both carry a P770 — Korda in the 5-iron, Hull in the 4-iron — and in both cases it is a single club sitting in front of something more compact. Three elite bags, two of them treating the P770 as a specialist and none of them treating it as a set.

What they actually are

The PING i240 is a cast 431 stainless players' cavity-back, the successor to the i230, with a lighter multi-material badge that frees weight for stability and a tour-requested groove pattern — fewer grooves, cut wider — that holds spin better out of wet rough. It is a conventional construction executed to a very high standard, and reviewers keep landing on the same word for it: consistent, for a head that size.

The TaylorMade P770 is a different animal wearing similar clothes. It is a forged hollow body: a thin, fast face with SpeedFoam Air behind it and a Thru-Slot Speed Pocket cut into the sole of the long irons. From address it looks like a players' iron, with modest offset and a compact blade length. Behind the face it is a distance iron, and it is engineered to blend into a set alongside P7-series heads rather than to stand alone.

The three specs that decide it

Loft options. This is the i240's strongest card and it gets almost no airtime. PING offers the head in Standard, Power Spec and Retro Spec lofts. That means the same iron can be set up to fly two quite different ways before anybody discusses a shaft — Power Spec for a player who needs more from the long end, Retro Spec for a player whose 7-iron already goes further than their gapping can cope with. Very few players' irons hand you that lever at the point of order.

Ball speed where you need it. This is the P770's card. The hollow body and the Speed Pocket do most of their work in the 4, 5 and 6-irons, which is exactly where a cavity-back players' iron is weakest and where most amateurs lose height. If your 5-iron flies low, runs out and will not hold a green, the P770 is a genuine mechanical answer rather than a marketing one.

Price per club, which is not what the headline says. A steel i240 set is around $1,350 for seven clubs, so roughly $190 a club. The P770 lists at about $1,350 in the United Kingdom for a 5-iron to pitching wedge build, which is six clubs, so nearer $225 each. That is about nineteen per cent more per club for the TaylorMade, and it matters enormously if you are buying three of them rather than seven.

The blend, which is what tour bags actually do

Look again at how Korda and Hull carry theirs. One P770 each, at the top of a set of P7CB cavities and P7MB blades respectively. The manufacturer designs for this deliberately, and there is nothing exotic about asking a fitter to do the same. What it buys you is the honest bit: the long irons stop being a lottery, and the scoring irons keep the compact head and the feedback you wanted in the first place.

If that is the direction you are heading, the Titleist T150 is the third name worth knowing. It is Titleist's players' distance iron — a forged face insert with internal tungsten weighting, stronger lofts than a T100, and a compact shape with a thin topline. It exists largely to be blended inside a mixed T-Series set, and tour bags use it exactly that way.

The one thing to watch in any blend is the loft progression across the join. Mixing a strong-lofted distance iron into a traditionally lofted set is how people end up with a 40-yard gap in one place and a 5-yard gap in another. A decent fitter will bend the join clubs to close it. A shop that will not have that conversation is a shop to leave.

Who should buy the i240

The decent ball striker who wants a whole set and does not want to think about it again for five years. You catch it more or less out of the middle, your miss is a shape rather than a strike location, and what you want from an iron is a predictable number and enough forgiveness to survive a bad Saturday. The loft spec is the conversation to have at order, not the shaft brand. Handicap-wise this is comfortable from scratch to about twelve, and it stretches further than that for a player with a repeating strike.

Who should buy the P770

Two groups, and they are different sizes. The small one is the golfer who genuinely wants the full set: you want a compact head, your speed is moderate, and your long irons have never flown high enough to hold anything. The much larger one is the golfer buying two or three of them for the top of another set. If you are in that second group, note that you are spending around $225 a club and you should be spending it on a fitting at the same time.

Who should skip both

If your handicap is above about fifteen, neither of these is your iron and the money is better spent elsewhere. The compact head is not the problem — the problem is that both of these clubs assume a strike pattern you may not have yet, and a game-improvement set plus a proper fitting will score better and cost less. Our irons and wedges guide covers that end properly, and should you play blades makes the broader case about where forgiveness actually goes missing.

And if you are replacing irons because your long irons are the problem, read the whole bag first. Three of the four Solheim Cup bags we maintain solved that by not carrying long irons at all — the count is here — which is a cheaper fix than a new set and a better one.