TaylorMade Qi10 fairway review: the 3-wood the best players never replaced

The TaylorMade Qi10 fairway is the easiest-launching, most forgiving flagship 3-wood of its generation, and the most-played fairway wood in the tour bags we track — by a distance. If you want a fairway you can hit off the deck without a perfect strike, this is the one I would buy. If you already own a recent forgiving fairway, you do not need it. What makes it interesting is not the technology, it is that the best players in the world had two chances to replace it and did not.

The number: eight bags, and nobody moved on

Of the 53 current tour setups we track, 8 carry a Qi10 fairway — more than any other fairway model. TaylorMade's newer Qi35 fairway appears in 2. The Qi10 launched in 2024. It is, in equipment-marketing terms, old.

The eight are Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama, J.J. Spaun, Keegan Bradley, Akshay Bhatia, Adam Scott and Dustin Johnson. Scheffler and McIlroy are the two most scrutinised bags in golf and both are TaylorMade staff, which means they get first access to every new head and no financial reason to keep an old one. They kept it anyway. Adam Scott carries two of them, at 5-wood and 9-wood.

Fairway woods are the slot where this happens most. A driver gets replaced because a fitter can show you two miles an hour; a 3-wood that launches off a tight lie gets kept because the player trusts it, and trust does not show up on a launch monitor. That is the honest reason this list looks the way it does. (This is the set of bags we maintain and re-verify against named sources, not a census, and setups change week to week.)

What the head actually does

We do not test clubs, so here is the consensus from the reviewers who put it on a launch monitor. The Qi10 was widely rated the most forgiving flagship fairway of its year: roughly 42g of mass stacked low and close to the face with a further 15g at the back, a face about 5% larger than the previous generation, and a speed pocket that lifts strikes found low on the face so they fly closer to a centre hit than they deserve to.

Testers consistently reported the same two things — that it is unusually easy to launch from the deck, and that it holds its start line on off-centre strikes rather than leaking. Those are the only two qualities that matter in a 3-wood for most golfers, because the shot you actually need it for is a long second from a lie that is not perfect.

The awkward part: the newer one is cheaper

Be clear-eyed about this. The Qi35 fairway is the current model and, at the time of writing, we have it in the catalogue at less than the Qi10's $450. So the usual last-year's-flagship logic — the one that works so well on drivers — does not apply here in the way you would expect.

That reframes the decision usefully. If you are choosing between them, you are not choosing the cheap option and the expensive option; you are choosing between two heads on their merits. The tour-bag count is the strongest single piece of evidence available to a buyer who cannot test both, and it points at the Qi10. Get both in a bay if you can and let the numbers decide, and treat model-year thinking as the marketing device it usually is.

Who should buy — and who should skip

Buy it if you want one fairway wood that works off the tee and the turf, and you are not a consistent enough striker to want a compact tour head. It suits the golfer who reaches for a 3-wood on tight par fours and needs it to get airborne from a fairway lie without a perfect strike.

Skip it if launching a fairway wood is your specific problem — the shallower, more lofted Max version of this head was built for exactly that and will do more for you. Skip it if your current fairway is recent and you get on with it, because this is the club category with the longest useful life in the bag and the tour bags above are the proof. And skip it if what you actually need is a 7-wood or a hybrid: the modern high-lofted fairway has quietly taken over the long-iron slot for a lot of players, and it is an easier club to hit than any 3-wood ever made.

At around $450 this is not a cheap club, and it is the one in the bag most often bought on brand rather than fit. Get the loft and shaft checked, and if the bay says the newer head suits you better, buy that instead. But on the evidence of who is still playing it two years on, the Qi10 is not a compromise.