Lamborghini: Faster Than a Speeding Golf Ball?

MELBOURNE, Australia — The Australian Open golf tournament opened today in Sydney, but not before some silliness equal to anything Formula 1 or NASCAR could come up with. Australian golfer Stuart Appleby stopped by the Sandown racetrack in Melbourne pre-tournament. There, he pitted a newly released Callaway golf club versus a Lamborghini Gallardo to see whether the ball or the car would go faster. Appleby, of course, is a Callaway spokesman — but he also proudly told Golf magazine in a 2007 interview about his personal Gallardo.

The Lambo, from a rolling start, got to 60 mph in under 3.7 seconds and went on to hit 137 mph, but that — not surprisingly — was not enough to beat the ball's speed over the Sandown track straight. As the video shows, it was a photo finish, though, with the ball landing just in front of the windshield at the end of the 275-yard run.

The club was a Diablo Octane driver made of forged composite carbon, developed in conjunction with Lamborghini's R&D team. That lets it send drives farther than the previous Diablo Edge driver by 8 yards on average. Callaway is saying this material is the next step after the previous hot club ingredient, titanium.

Callaway and Lamborghini have been working together on advanced composites for some time, culminating for the carmaker with the debut of the Sesto Elemento concept at the 2010 Paris Auto Show.

Inside Line says: Two heavyweights of the lightweight join forces. — Laura Sky Brown, Correspondent