CARLSBAD, Calif. — Chip Brewer had been looking for a North Star to point to, a telos for the masses to get behind. For him, it was always going to be speed.
So, standing on a makeshift stage in the Callaway parking lot during a company picnic, he took the mic and let them into the future.
“It’s called Project Ricky Bobby,” he said.
Oliver “Chip” Brewer III, 61, is a man who loves a big swing. Thankfully, he’s at a company built on risk. The spirit of Ely Callaway — ahem, “Mr. Callaway” — cannot be ignored in this building. Mr. Callaway sold his wine company and gambled on a struggling golf club brand, Hickory Sticks. He bet big on engineers and innovation. Forty-some years later, his mottos are literally written on the walls. Manufacturing workers tell stories of Mr. Callaway walking through the plants and remembering their names.
Brewer is evolving into that kind of figure here. He took over a company losing ground in 2012, back when it repeatedly chose cheaper over better. He brought Callaway back, with research and development his nonnegotiable.
So when that crowd back in 2024 looked around, wondering, “What the hell is Project Ricky Bobby?”, Brian Williams already knew. The head of research and development had been in the meetings, the ones in which Brewer launched this idea. “If you’re not first, you’re last” was said more than once. Williams was told they could trade nothing for speed. Not design. Not forgiveness. Callaway’s next driver had to be the fastest on the market.
“It’s an arms race,” Brewer says.
Golf manufacturing is essentially a four-company oligopoly built on pouring money into research and development with the hopes of finding the next big thing. Callaway and Titleist spend $50 million to $70 million a year on R&D. Falling behind means losing share in a $10 billion market. Losing market share means failure. Yet a misguided Hail Mary can tank those margins and cost you for years. It’s happened to both companies in the last 25 years.
The Athletic was granted rare access inside Callaway’s offices and behind the two-year process that turned Project Ricky Bobby into Quantum, the driver that hit the market in January and that it believes is one of the company’s greatest innovations.
But it didn’t really all start on that stage. Here’s how a driver is really born.
A double bacon cheeseburger was where it all started. Yaming Pan sat in the Callaway food court with a double bacon cheeseburger in hand. He was around 30 at the time, a Chinese-born engineer who came to California facing the simple question seemingly every engineer here had to answer when navigating a college path: missiles or golf? The latter brought him to this meal.
He stared at the burger. Patty. Cheese. Patty. Cheese. Bacon. On top of each other, but also lightly fused in perfect edible harmony.
“Why a single layer?” he asked himself.
He thought about the advancements in layers of foam and carbon fiber in running shoes. Why couldn’t golf go down that path? So much of this story deep down is about materials, and there was a growing concern that these companies had maxed out the potential of titanium. Pan ran upstairs with an idea to push it further. The original code name for Quantum was “Double Cheese.” He hopped on Callaway’s artificial intelligence modeling system — another leap of faith, a splurge decades in the works — and ran hundreds, maybe thousands of tests with different combinations of materials. He was clearly onto something, but it’s all about finding the right pieces. He found one in particular that they’d already been testing. So he went to Nate Reed.
“Hey, I need the mayo,” Pan said of his Double Cheese. “Your mayo.”
The proverbial mayo was a material Reed, a young, blond concept engineer from San Diego, had been working on for years. A lot of this job is reading papers and studies, and problem-solving by working backward to find solutions — the less sexy part. But you know what is sexy? Bombs.
In his research, Reed found poly mesh, a highly flexible, military-grade polymer used in military defense. Bomb shelters. It could be applied on the back of a wall, and it increases the strength of the material against shrapnel or explosions.
“I just instantly saw a driver face,” Reed said.
But that was back in 2019, maybe four years before Pan was in the food court. Life in R&D is constantly finding cool ideas and holding on to them for when opportunity comes. “We literally call it the parking lot of ideas,” said Nick Yontz, R&D manager of advanced innovation. They tested it on the back of titanium — and by testing, they mean firing a cannon into it — and it increased the strength. So, what should they do with it? The original plan was long drive contests. They’d dominate that niche market, prove it worked and go from there. But in 2020, the World Long Drive Association shut down.
Poly mesh went back on the shelf until Pan needed mayo. This is how one innovation leads to another. Back in 2017, Callaway unveiled Jailbreak technology, using titanium bars to support a lighter carbon fiber body and decrease weight. That launched its drivers for nearly a decade. But with Reed’s poly mesh discovery and Pan’s layer idea, they ultimately realized they could use the former as the conformal layer between a thin titanium face and a thin carbon fiber back.
Three layers. Quantum’s Tri-Force Face.
Now, all of that wasn’t settled by just Pan and Reed. They had their ideas. They had their data through the AI model. And then they could bring a presentation to Jim Seluga.
Seluga is an engineer’s engineer, the kind of person who it sure feels like did a crash-course study on journalism the day before this interview so he could relate and use writing analogies to describe engineering (it worked, by the way). The kind who has a Post-it-filled copy of “Mechanical Vibrations” by S.S. Rao ready to pull out of the bookshelf at any moment. But don’t be mistaken. Like a good chunk of these engineers, he’s a proper golfer who played at Boston University.
The department he and Yontz oversee is nicknamed the “Toy Store.” Twelve or so engineers, purposely picked because of varying backgrounds and skill sets, whose job is to come up with the next big thing. They are not responsible for next year’s club. They are quite rarely thinking about anything in the short term. By the time a driver hits the market, they’ve been on to the next thing for years.
If Williams is the head coach of R&D, managing each little department and making it all sing, Seluga is the whiz offensive coordinator masterminding schemes on the whiteboard. And maybe Yontz, who oversees the execution arm of ideas and works with PGA Tour pros on products, is the defensive coordinator. It’s not a perfect metaphor. But their department creates a fascinating balance between art and science.
“I’m a creative engineer,” Seluga said. “So I create through science, if that makes sense. So, it’s more create through learning. Learn about what your topic is and use that as a force to be creative.”
This is a moment in time when golf equipment manufacturers are the heroes and the villains of the sport. There are the champions of the everyman, boosting club forgiveness and distance at the same time, inching people closer to “good” in a sport where success is so often fleeting. But in some corners, they are the bad guys, the real culprits of professional golfers hitting the ball too far and rendering iconic courses obsolete, all while the effort to roll back the golf ball gets the misplaced attention. These are the golf-world Oppenheimers who playfully scoff at this narrative. The quick response to those questions is consistently a playful, “I’ve yet to hear from a golfer frustrated they are hitting it too far.” Their job is simply to create.
Williams’ personal guiding principle is fostering that culture. He cares deeply about not nixing any ideas, wanting to encourage exploration and creativity. Let it fester and grow. Quite often, an idea like titanium 3D printing or artificial-intelligence-backed supercomputers will seem years away and untenable, but pausing instead of canceling keeps it around for when the technology catches up and the stars align.
The real skill, though, is knowing which ideas to bet on.
A buzz infects the Callaway offices when an idea takes hold. Everyone walks in the building with a pep in their step and an urgent need to attend the next meeting. That’s when the “Yes, and …” mentality takes hold. The meetings grow. So does the conviction.
So as soon as one team was pulling up graphs on the supercomputer to measure ball speed versus distance on all past products, the others were pointing to all the white space on the graph. We can’t get there with just titanium or carbon. What that material was remained unclear, but Williams could see something there.
Then Williams hit a prototype. No Trackman. No numbers. Just feel. And he loved it. The idea just kept moving and moving and moving, all green lights, all positive, until the day Brewer sat in an office in late 2024 and proclaimed, “This is our 2026 driver. Go figure out how to do it.” That could be terrifying. In an executive meeting more than a year before launch, they all went around the room. Each person said, “I believe in it.”
“Somebody brought up the idea of a backup plan or contingency,” Williams said, “and we said, ‘Let’s not do one.’”
No safety nets. It was Quantum or bust.
“Because we’re going to take bets,” Brewer said. “Yeah, some of them won’t work. But you know, we’re also careful, and we’re unlikely to commit ‘all in’ until we are reasonably comfortable. So it’s going to be hard. It’s more often just to be late than it would be an utter failure, because we’re not betting everything.”
Williams is essentially the man tasked with making good on Brewer’s big bets.
It’s the double-edged sword these companies wield. Standing still is death. Brandishing without abandon is a catastrophe. Think back to 2002, when Callaway went all in on a 100 percent carbon-composite head. The sound was terrible. It lacked distance. It failed, and TaylorMade’s own innovations made it No. 1 on drivers for a decade until its 2013 product that amateurs couldn’t get in the air. It bombed, and the company lost 27 percent in sales and $315 million in revenue, according to its earnings report. Those kinds of mistakes then create a flawed loop, like Callaway going cheaper to save money.
“Right when Chip came in,” Seluga said, “it went from being a company of commodity — where the philosophy was ‘reduce the cost of products; golf clubs don’t matter for performance; people just buy Callaway for the brand’ — to Chip completely switching that. That’s one of the big things that turned around Callaway. How do we turn this back into a technology company? Innovations and things that make it so special, people want to buy it.”
Brewer went all in on R&D — to the point he jokes their budget is unlimited. Where there was once just one, there are now 20 modern multi-axis CNC machines for prototyping. “I’m a product guy,” he repeats often. And if Brewer is giving R&D a blank check, Williams is the one using it.
Williams, 46, does not look like a nerd. He’s tall, athletic and broad-shouldered with a brown beard. He looks more like he played tight end in college. Intentionally or not, he was molded for this role. He joined Callaway out of school on the manufacturing side. When his plant was about to shut down, he got a nudge to apply for a gig with program management. Then a supply chain job, seemingly moving to a different department every five years as he saw every nook and cranny of this place. An affable, charming guy, Williams even handled Callaway’s career fairs for years and hired much of the company’s young talent.
Now he runs R&D. He’s the marriage between the idea men, the prototypers, the computer mappers, the designers, the manufacturers and so on. That means being qualified on everything and an expert on nothing. He needs to be able to discuss carbon fiber one minute and then walk over to a mood board filled with aesthetic inspirations like sports cars and football stadiums to settle on a look. And then set up all those experts to be that person in the big meetings.
When Alex Power — another young prototype engineer who came from Williams’ career fair circuit — made his case for titanium 3D printing six years ago, Williams felt it was too expensive and too far away. But Power was sure something important was coming, so Williams gave him the go-ahead to pursue it. Power spent years studying the subject from manufacturers and subcontractors. He went to eight or nine operations to see different usages. It took six months just to figure out the correct path. Then they spent millions on the machine. Another $500,000 to create its own captured air system so the extremely explosive titanium powder doesn’t go boom. Then they took another year just installing with trial and error to get it working.
But now, instead of waiting weeks for manufacturers to make a prototype, they can have an idea and try it ASAP.
Ryder Cup participant Sam Burns has quickly put the Quantum driver in his bag. (Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)
Brewer loves a big swing, sure, but he hates a hollow action. He rolls his eyes at how AI and 3D printing can be used as meaningless buzzwords to make something sound forward-thinking. A gamble needed to be fact-based. Power and company did the ground work. Williams harnessed it. Brewer signed the check.
“But it’s a total breakthrough,” Brewer said. “And you’ve just got to believe that this is where we’re going to compete. So, those resources are going to be funded. You don’t know for sure, but you know that that’s the kind of bet we’ll do every day.”
“Nobody has an ugly baby, right?” Seluga jokes. Of course not. Everybody’s baby is perfect and beautiful and should be cared for.
“But in an innovation mindset, every product you make has to be an ugly product,” he continued, “because you have to make it better the next time. You can’t fall in love with what you had.”
That’s why on a gorgeous Friday afternoon in Southern California at the Ely Callaway Performance Center, as the normies are getting fitted for those brand-new 2026 Quantum drivers, a gaggle of Callaway engineers is off in the corner of the driving range testing something new. Seluga, Yontz and others are taking cracks with a microphone nearby to track the sound because it has to sound right, too. For a club that might not hit the market until 2029. Maybe 2030.
Golf manufacturing is about celebrating a club that’s been finished, at least on the innovation side, for a year. The executives will make their big bucks. The pros and amateurs will swing away, but the hay has been in the barn for a long time.
The reviews have been good. MyGolfSpy has two iterations of the Quantum in its top three drivers for 2026. GolfDigest had the Quantum Max at the top of its 2026 Hot List. Callaway golfers such as Si Woo Kim and Sam Burns are having strong starts with the Quantum in their bags.
Burns is usually a pain for manufacturers. It takes quite a while for him to add a new club, often sticking with tried-and-true older models. He looks for the start line, launch and spin to match his usual results. But when he tried Quantum this offseason, it took him eight swings to be on board.
“This thing is different,” he said, as he’s off to his best statistical start off the tee in three years.
It’s why Williams can’t help but think about this little nook on the first floor of the Callaway offices. It’s something of an informal hall of fame, a collection of club heads in glass boxes sitting atop mini wooden shelves on the wall. There’s the Big Bertha, of course. There’s the Epic driver. There are the Hawkeye irons from 2000 and putter heads, too.
But Williams has a feeling it might be time to take one item off to make space. He wonders if Quantum will earn a spot on the wall.
Before he can think about it too long, though, he’s walking through the doors of the lab, talking about their next idea.
“It’s hard,” Seluga said, “to celebrate.”