PITTSBURGH — Rory McIlroy is doing more than struggling to find the right driver and recapture the form that made him the game’s greatest driver of the ball.

He is struggling to find the proper motivation and recapture the desire that fueled his fast start to the season and ultimately resulted in winning the Masters.

The world’s No. 2 player is having trouble with each.

“I think it's trying to have a little bit of amnesia and forget about what happened six weeks ago,” McIlroy said on Tuesday, “then just trying to find the motivation to go back out there and work as hard as I've been working.”

It has not been easy.

McIlroy comes to Oakmont Country Club with the most impressive U.S. Open resume of any player in the 156-man field, having been runner-up in each of the past two years and finishing inside the top 10 in the past six. He and world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler are the only players with three PGA Tour victories each this season.

But since winning the green jacket and becoming the sixth player in history to complete the Grand Slam, McIlroy finished a distant 47th in the PGA Championship and embarrassingly missed the cut in the RBC Canadian Open with the highest 36-hole score of his PGA Tour career.

“I worked incredibly hard on my game from October last year all the way up until April this year,” McIlroy said. “It was nice to sort of see the fruits of my labor come to fruition and have everything happen. But at the same time, you have to enjoy that. You have to enjoy what you've just accomplished. I certainly feel like I'm still doing that and I will continue to do that.

“At some point, you have to realize that there's a little bit more golf left to play this season. I sort of need to get my stuff together here and get back to the process and sort of what I'd been doing for that seven months from October last year until April this year.”

The world’s No. 2 player was asked if that has been tougher or taken longer than he imagined.

“Look, you dream about the final putt going in at the Masters, but you don't think about what comes next,” he said. “I think I've always been a player that struggles to play after a big event, after I win whatever tournament. I always struggle to show up with motivation the next week because you've just accomplished something and you want to enjoy it and you want to sort of relish the fact that you've achieved a goal.

“I think chasing a certain goal for the better part of a decade and a half [at the Masters], I think I'm allowed a little bit of time to relax a little bit. But here at Oakmont, I certainly can't relax this week.”

McIlroy has been battling other issues, as well, though they are more mechanical. And it’s his greatest weapon in the bag — his driver.

His problems began before the start of the PGA Championship when a random test by the USGA deemed his club to be nonconforming. Since then, he has been a combined 12-over in six rounds at the PGA Championship and RBC Canadian Open.

McIlroy has switched back and forth between TaylorMade’s newest model, the Qi35 driver, to his old one, the Qi10, which he used to win the Players and the Masters. He even tried a shorter 44-inch driver to gain more accuracy at TPC Toronto, but that didn’t provide the desired results.

McIlroy would not discuss which TaylorMade model he will use at Oakmont, only to say, “Come out and watch me hit balls, and you’ll see.”

He added, “I think I learnt a lot on Thursday and Friday last week and did a good bit of practice at home and feel like I'm in a better place with everything going into this week.”

What’s curious about McIlroy’s struggles is every player and equipment manufacturer will tell you the shaft is the engine that fuels the driver, not the club head. A simple fix would appear to be just popping the same shaft into a new club head.

That’s effectively what two-time major champion Jon Rahm did last year when he was struggling with a recurring left miss off the tee.

He took out an Aldila Tour Green 75TX shaft he had been using for 11 years and replaced it with a Ventus Black 7X shaft in his Callaway driver.

After the shaft change, the 2021 U.S. Open champion went on to win his first two LIV Golf titles and the seasonlong individual crown.

“I think I had outgrown the shaft I was playing,” Rahm said Tuesday before playing a practice round. “I think that shaft had just run its course.

“It wasn't performing the same way mainly because I have more swing speed. I think back then, when I did it, I was around 175 [mph]. If I stepped on it, 177 ball speed. Now it's almost 10 miles an hour more. That's a big change.”

Then he added, “It seems so simple, so trivial, but I think it had been happening for a better part of a year, year and a half and I think overcorrecting those mistakes is always going to be harder than creating those bad habits.”

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