A year on from The Open
Royal Troon tunes Toro to perfection
One year after The Open Championship returned to Royal Troon, the club continues to raise the bar in turfcare excellence, with the help of Toro’s technology and Reesink support.
Royal Troon’s club house, designed by Henry Edward Clifford and built in 1886.
Since the excitement of the tournament, Course Manager Billy McLachlan and his team have focused on rebuilding, recovery, and long-term improvements. With the crowds gone, infrastructure dismantled and grass beneath repaired, attention has turned to machine performance and precision.
“Hosting The Open again was a great experience and bigger than ever, with over 250,000 visitors,” says Billy. “I’ve got a great team, and the support from Toro and Reesink was first class.”
In the build up to the tournament, Head Mechanic, Davy Mclelland, began adjusting the club’s Toro fleet daily, testing settings like height-of-cut and cylinder speeds to achieve the best possible finish.
The picture-perfect after-cut finish achieved by Royal Troon’s dialled-in Toro mowers.
That attention to detail has continued since The Open, and is now part of daily practice: “Davy is a brilliant mechanic,” says Billy. “He’s measuring factors like height of cut and cylinder speed; if the speed is too fast, for instance, you’re not giving the blade enough time to make contact with the leaf.
“It all comes back to a simple question: What’s the best way of cutting and how can we do that? We’ve benchmarked data for all these settings, so we know what’s working, why it’s working, and how to adjust our cutting methods accordingly.”
As Reesink’s Product Specialist, Alastair Black, explains, this level of precision is rare: “Most clubs adjust settings a few times a season. But Troon is doing it on an almost daily basis, and the results show.
Troon’s mechanical team has also attended Reesink’s Turfcare Mechanics course, which Billy says is integral to the job: “Training is everything. We already had the machines running well, but learning from the experts took our results even further.
“To be good at this job, you’ve got to keep your eyes and ears open – and always be willing to learn,” he concludes. “That’s one thing that will always be a vital part of Troon, our team, and our success.”