Since Jason Day came along and customised his Spider Tour putter, TaylorMade has started to see red with their putters.
As Day ascended to the top of the world rankings, everyone else turned red too and now the distinctive Tour Red colour scheme comes to the TP Collection to create the TaylorMade TP Red putters.
Each of the heads are milled from 304 stainless steel and weigh 355g with 34 and 35 inch shafts. The double bend shaft makes the head face balanced, the L neck has a 27° toe hang and the shorter hosel of the Ardmore 3 comes with a 40° hang.
The face features the same Pure Roll insert as the TP Collection, which is a 6061 aluminium insert with 45° grooves and a soft polymer between them to improve the forward roll and reduce skidding.
This it does pretty well, but it is still quite a soft feeling insert and gives a little bit of a hollow sound at impact. However it is much better than the Surlyn inserts they used to use, so it is good to see this aluminium version come over from the Spider Tour into the mainstream putter range.
There is a choice of 6 different heads which have a nice rounded style, most of which are familiar shapes even if they all seem to be called Ardmore.
The Ardmore 2 shape below is in vogue at present and there is a choice of two types of hosel to change the face balance of each model, so go in with an open mind and see which suits you best.
All of them line up well and the prominent white site lines really stand out on the red heads and therefore it just depends whether you like them in line with, or either side of the ball.
My personal choice would be the centre shafted Ardmore CTR because I liked that style of sightline and the shaft position meant that it gave a much more solid feel than the rest of the range.
If they could get everything feeling like the CTR then TaylorMade could be on to a winner with the TP Red Collection, but at this price the buy signal is more amber than green.