Rory McIlroy hopes to brush up on his driving ahead of his latest jaunt at the career grand slam with the Masters at Augusta National less than two weeks away.
McIlroy won the Players Championship a fortnight ago virtually from the rough and trees and ahead of his final competitive warm up at the Texas Children’s Houston Open this week he was looking to improve on his driving statistics having dabbled between the new Taylormade Qi 35 and last year’s Qi 10 model.
The Holywood man carded a bogey-free 65 on Saturday at Memorial Park with a chip in eagle on his 17th the highlight, but ranked 40th in strokes gained off the tee, finding just five of thirteen fairways and he admits he wants to see some progress in that category on Sunday before he heads to Augusta.
“I wanted to see myself drive it a little bit better, which I haven’t really seen,” said McIlroy. “It’s hard here because, you know, it’s so wide that it entices you to just stand up and try to hit it as hard as you can, so accuracy isn’t a premium at all this week.”
The four-time major winner has seen some positive signs in other aspects of his game heading to Augusta. McIlroy was second in strokes gained around the green in round three and is 13th for the overall tournament while his putting has improved from 127th after round one.
“Then I guess like short game-wise, like chipping, I wanted that to be a little better. I felt I was a little tentative with some chips at Sawgrass, but chipping’s been really good this week. I scrambled well, so that’s been good to see. Still feel like I need to do a little bit of work off the tee and sort of get the driver figured out.”
McIlroy is eight shots behind leader Min Woo Lee who certainly cooked up a storm with a sizzling 63 to open a four shot lead over Alejandro Tosti on seventeen-under and five ahead of world number one Scottie Scheffler.
The Australian is chasing his first PGA Tour win and had eight consecutive one-putt greens, though some of those started just off the green, allowing him to putt.
“Everything’s kind of clicking and I just feel really good about it,” Lee said.
“I just got told that I had one eight-putts (sic) in a row or something like that and 10 putts in 10 holes. Yeah, I guess it was a little autopilot early on. Very solid day again. The last couple days were really good. Today was a really long day, I need to get back into bed. But maybe that’s what I have to do, I might have to do two warmups, two physio sessions and maybe I can shoot 7 under all the time. No, it was great fun and very solid overall.”
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