New sticks, no drawback for Shane Lowry.
Lowry leapt up the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship on Saturday along with his second straight 6-under 66, simply his third spherical since swapping out 12 golf equipment and his golf ball.
“What’s occurring earlier than me, I haven’t actually considered,” mentioned Lowry, who at 15 below sits simply three photographs again of chief Paul Waring. “I’ve simply been attempting to get used to this, and it’s going very properly to this point. Hopefully, it retains going that means.”
Lowry’s new Cleveland/Srixon tools are all prototypes:
- ZX Proto driver (9.5 levels)
- ZX Proto driving iron (3)
- ZX Proto irons (4-PW)
- Cleveland Proto wedges (50, 54 and 58 levels)
- Proto Z-Star XV ball
Staying in Lowry’s bag are his TaylorMade M5 fairway wooden (18.25 levels) and TaylorMade Spider Tour Z putter.
“My recreation, like, I’ve been driving the ball actually good, my iron play has been nice,” Lowry mentioned. “, I in all probability haven’t been holing as many putts as I would really like. I really feel like I’m placing all proper, hitting good putts, not lacking the shorter ones. And I really feel like, yeah, a couple of putts drop, I might be harmful.”
Lowry opened with a 6-under 30 on Yas Hyperlinks’ entrance 9 on Saturday, a stretch highlighted by his 36-foot eagle make on the par-5 second gap. He bogeyed the par-3 seventeenth, his solely blemish, however backed that up with a closing birdie on the par-5 18th.
Waring, who posted the bottom 36-hole rating in relation to par in DP World Tour historical past, got here again to the sector with a third-round 73 and solely leads Niklas Norgaard by a shot. Tommy Fleetwood, Thorbjorn Olesen and Sebastian Soderberg are tied with Lowry for third.
Rory McIlroy is T-13 at 13 below after a third-round 69, which was capped by a double bogey on No. 18. McIlroy is 3 over on Nos. 17-18 this week.
“Premature mistake,” McIlroy mentioned, “similar to yesterday on 17 and dug myself a bit of little bit of a gap to get out of. … I simply must put all of it collectively and play the way in which I’ve been taking part in and maintain the massive errors and massive numbers off my card, and if I can try this and submit a rating, you by no means know.”
