ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates -- Golf star Rory McIlroy can finish a season as the top player on the Europe-based DP World Tour for the sixth time with a win at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, which starts Thursday.

He'll attempt to do so with a new swing.

McIlroy, No. 3 in the Official World Golf Ranking, said he has been hunkered down in a studio -- first in Florida, then in New York -- for three weeks, just hitting balls at a screen with a modified swing and not even looking at the flight of his shots.

He hasn't liked the shape of his swing for a while, he said Wednesday, and wanted a more robust one that could hold up in the most pressure-filled moments after a number of missed chances this year. The most notable was at the U.S. Open in June, where he missed two putts in the three-foot range in the final three holes on Sunday to pave the way for a victory for Bryson DeChambeau and extend McIlroy's decade without a major title after winning four from 2011-14.

"The only way I was going to make a change, or at least move in the right direction, with my swing was to lock myself in a studio and not see the ball flight for a bit and just focus entirely on the movement," said McIlroy who has won the PGA Championship twice (2012, 2014), the 2011 U.S. Open and the 2014 U.S. Open for his quartet of victories in golf's biggest tournaments.

"It's something just to make my golf swing more efficient," he continued, "and then if it is more efficient, then it means it's not going to break down as much under pressure. If I look at my year, the one thing that I would criticize myself on is the fact that I've had these chances to win."

The 35-year-old from Northern Ireland has won twice this year -- at the DP World Tour's Dubai Desert Classic and the PGA Tour's Wells Fargo Championship -- and has finished second four times in 2024, including recently at the Irish Open and the BMW PGA Championship.

That has left him frustrated but well clear in the Race to Dubai rankings that determine the best player of the year on the European circuit. A win in Abu Dhabi this weekend would seal the title and remove some suspense -- at least for McIlroy -- from the final event of the season, the World Tour Championship in nearby Dubai next week.

"If I go out and win this week, obviously you know, it makes it a bit boring next week," he said. "But I won't find it boring. It will be lovely."

A sixth Race to Dubai title -- it used to be called the Order of Merit -- would tie him with the late Spanish star Seve Ballesteros on the all-time list and be only two behind Scottish great Colin Montgomerie for the record.

"I'm a European player," McIlroy said. "I would like to go down as the most successful European of all time. Obviously Race to Dubai wins would count to that but also major championships, and hopefully I've got a few more Ryder Cups ahead of me as well.

"So that's something that I would like ... I think (it) is a goal that's quite attainable over the next 10 years."