Tomo Bystedt was first exposed to what would become the Stealth driver in 2014.

The face of the driver is made of carbon, and red. It’s a game-changer in the market and is already in the bags of Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, and more. Thousands of golfers have already made the switch – many of whom will never go back.

TaylorMade has always been a driver company. Its first product, in 1979, was 190cc head cast of stainless steel. Quickly, the ‘Original One’ became way easier to hit than wooden drivers. TaylorMade says every technological breakthrough can be traced back to that one. The one.

Since then, TaylorMade has continued to innovate and launch products that have become the catalyst for millions of golfers to hit it further and straighter. The Bubble Shaft,

The Burner, The 300 Series, The ‘R’ series of drivers – including the R7 Quad (the first with moveable-weight technology),

The ‘M’ series of drivers, SLDR, SIM, SIM2 and now, Stealth.

Golf has come a long way since 1979, and so has TaylorMade.

Now, Bystedt tells us, the company has never been more excited for the future.

“Think about technology in general and in any industry. Cars going from internal combustion engines to electric opens up so many opportunities for car manufacturers to do new things and think differently,” he says. “The same thing is happening to us with the carbon face. We feel this is opening a new door for us and it will allow us to do things differently.”

A team of engineers first starting tinkering with a carbon face in 2000. There were dozens of iterations. But before long the team pivoted to have a laser-like focus on the most important part of a driver. You know, the thing that contacts the ball? Things quickly became all about the face.

“In 2014 I was on a small project essentially to try to bring this technology to market and I worked on it for about a year with a bunch of engineers. But we just couldn’t get it across the line,” says Bystedt, who works at TaylorMade’s headquarters in California. “It was the time when we were working on M1 and M2 and those products were incredible. We had just moved the goal posts too far. There was no point in launching it if it was not better than titanium.”

So, while TaylorMade was releasing industry-leading drivers through the mid-2000s with titanium faces, they were, in secret, coming up with something even better.

Bystedt, who you’ve likely seen alongside Woods, McIlroy, Johnson, Collin Morikawa, and others in TaylorMade’s product-launch commercials and content, says launching a driver with a carbon face has always been a technological dream of the team at TaylorMade.

Now it’s a reality.

They unlocked all these little things one by one – durability, speed, spin. They finally they got to the last door and ran right through it.

“There is a production-ready technology that we can unleash to millions of golfers (but) that took a pretty big leap for our team,” he says. “We replaced the most important part of the club – the face – with a material that hadn’t been battle tested in this scenario. For me and a lot of the team as well there as this feel like, ‘holy s—t’ we are actually going to do this.’”

Bystedt laughs when he admits what was said behind closed doors. But it’s the same turn of phrase he’s hearing now when people hit the Stealth line of drivers for the first time.

There’s been no shortage of technological evolution under TaylorMade’s roof.

“As a company we’re fairly bold in the sense that we’ll take risks on technologies. We’re not a follower in that sense,” says Bystedt.

Usually, he says, the team will take existing technology and just improve on it. For SIM2, for example, 80 percent of the club was the same as the SIM driver in terms of core technology. The Stealth, and Carbonwood, was brand new.

The Bubble shaft was bold and different, but no one is playing bubble shafts these days. It didn’t stick. But moveable weights? You can barely get a driver without one, now. The R7 from TaylorMade was first. And a loft sleeve, like in the R9? They were first there, too.

A carbon face was a risk. Especially because of what came just before it. Bystedt says TaylorMade is, essentially, abandoning the most successful driver face technology in the marketplace. The SIM2, a titanium face with Twist Face technology and Inverted Cone technology was the No.1 driver in golf a year ago. There was 20 years of titanium driver-face dominance prior to that.

As is the case with technological advancements, however – something TaylorMade is plenty familiar with – someone had to be first. Someone had to take the big leap. Someone had to hope an experiment will pay off.

So far, so good.

“Two years ago, we knew there was going to be this moment down the road when we unveil it to the world and people are going to be like, ‘wow, that’s pretty incredible,’” says Bystedt. “And here we are. It’s been kind of surreal in that way. It’s been a long time coming.”

But like most things, it was worth the wait.