Did Aldrich Potgieter really need more distance? He’s currently second on the PGA Tour in driving distance and ball speed, so potentially, there is margin for him to make up.

At the 2026 Texas Children’s Houston Open, he may just have found it, and some forgiveness to go with it.

Heading into the first of two stops in Texas before the season’s opening major championship, Pogeiter is looking to make some hefty changes to his driver setup as well as another pretty sizable change to the bottom end of his bag.

One of a few big-name stars to join the PXG ranks in the offseason, Potgieter started out 2026 playing the Lightning Tour head, equipped with a Fujikura Ventus 7 X VeloCore shaft. At Memorial Park Golf Course for the Houston Open, things have changed as he’s looking to use an unreleased Tour Max prototype along with the newly released Fujikura Ventus TR 7 X VeloCore+ shaft.

He’s one of the first to put the new shaft in play, and scarily, he can tame the stiffest Ventus shaft yet to find more ball speed.

“I hit it yesterday for the first time and it’s really good,” Potgieter said in Houston. “Picked up probably about 2 or 3 miles an hour ball speed, which is huge. So we’ll hopefully keep that out on the course. But no, it’s looking good.”

Not only has Potgieter found more distance, but more importantly for him, a better balance with that and forgiveness on mishits, thanks to increased bulge and roll on the Tour Max head along with the stability of the shaft.

“I feel like some of the miss-strikes are straightening up, I think it has a bit more bulge and rolls as well,” Potgieter said. “So yeah, we’re definitely looking forward to it. It’s been great on the range, so this is a big driving week for us as well on the golf course. So if we can hit a lot more fairways, it’ll be good.

“With the big head they shift more weight further back. I think that kind of gives us more forgiveness and find the right weight to put on that backside; that right balance is more important. So I think we were playing around with that a little bit more and we kind of found a nice sweet spot.”

Along with the changes to the top end of the back, Potgieter has also made a significant swap to his flatstick. As a long-time member of the Tour’s diminishing blade putter group, winning in Detroit with a Scotty Cameron 009M Tour Prototype, Potgieter had a short stint with L.A.B. Golf’s Link 2.1 HS blade during the Florida Swing. He’s now left the gang and moved into a TaylorMade Spider Tour X.

“I’ve been on the blade run for a little bit and I feel like when I’m playing really good, the blade’s probably the best thing, but when you’re off a little bit and there’s a couple of things that I’m working on and just when you have a little bit of mis-strike or something with that blade, your consistency just drops off,” Potgieter said. “So we tried the L.A.B. blade, but even with that a little bit it was difficult.

“So we went to the Spider this week and we’ve seen distance control and stuff like that. It’s been a lot better and so we’ll give that a go and it’s nice to experiment with some stuff, but you kind run out of time pretty quickly. So we’re trying to get something in the bag and keep it consistent and got a PXG kind of similar thing to that Spider that I’ll be trying out in the next couple of weeks, but trying to not change too much for Augusta coming up.”

The countdown is on with only two weeks remaining for Potgieter to pick his 14 clubs for the Masters.