New Product Launch: Bridgestone e6 Soft and e6 Speed Golf Balls
More so than most other golf ball manufacturers Bridgestone Golf has embraced the most basic of golf truisms: the game is a whole lot more fun when played from the middle of the fairway. Especially for golfers who are not chasing a paycheck – which is just about everybody.
Therefore, everything that Bridgestone does for its mid-priced e6 Series golf balls is about making the ball fly more straight with less spin. High spin rates are what give golfers the best chance at controlling the ball on all types of greens. Bridgestone also knows that it looks cool to watch an approach shot bite into the green and spin back like a yo-yo. They make B330 Series Tour golf balls for those folks.
#1 Ball Fitter in the Industry
A quick bit of history: in the early 1900s, many golf balls came from rubber tire manufacturers, a logical extension since wound golf balls were essentially a rubber product. Goodrich introduced the first pneumatic golf ball in 1906. Dunlop had a ball (James Bond’s preferred brand), and so did Uniroyal. Bridgestone, a Japanese company, put its first golf balls on the market in 1935, only four years after its first tires. As the need for rubber in modern golf balls diminished most of those companies left golf.
Bridgestone continued to hang around, albeit with a low market profile. About ten years ago, the company introduced ball-fitting. It was the same concept as club-fitting, seeking to find the ideal match of equipment to the game. Since that time, Bridgestone has accumulated data from 320,000 launch monitors on more than two million individual golf swings. All that data has been crunched to create two new Bridgestone e6 golf balls.
What Exactly is New with these e6 Golf Balls?
All of this means distilling down these data points into a single mantra – go straight. Bridgestone Golf is so committed to the “player development” ball that it has scrapped the e5 and e7. It’s all about two new e6 models now, the e6 Soft and the e6 Speed. While there are certainly differences between the two, they’re both designed with accuracy in mind.
They accomplish that goal with the lowest ball spin Bridgestone has ever produced. Both e6 balls are a three-piece construction with a Surlyn cover. They contain a mantle layer designed to keep the ball from compressing at impact which creates unwanted spin. If you listen to an engineer, you will hear about the counterbalancing forces of a mantle layer that fight against backspin imparted by the driver’s face. That means straighter. Bridgestone is very big on its mantle layer.
The outside of the new e6 balls works to get the ball headed straight as well. The new dimple pattern designed by Bridgestone has been tabbed “Delta Wing Dimples,” and its only job is to keep those drives flying straight and smooth. In short, the e6 is ready to fight against everything you do wrong on the tee and keep you in play. This is not the go-to ball if you want to work your shots right and left but from its millions of ball fittings, Bridgestone has concluded that most golfers don’t need a high spin ball that does that.
e6 Soft or e6 Speed?
While dismantling its e-Series line, Bridgestone still offers two versions of its “straight distance” e6. The e6 Soft provides more feel through the bag while the e6 Speed is designed to deliver faster initial ball velocity. Beyond that, they are designed to be identical fairway seeking missiles and sure to improve your game.
Bridgestone’s new e6 Soft and e6 Speed golf balls are now available in the following models: