Start with the weight. Nine point three ounces unstrung — 265 grams — and everything else about this frame follows from that single fact. The Speed MP UL is a genuinely ultra-light racquet, which means it is for a player who wants pace and spin without having to generate it out of raw strength. It is not a control frame.
It will not hold up against somebody hitting a heavy ball at you, and I am not going to pretend it will. What it does is get through the contact zone fast, and for a lot of players that is the entire case.
The rest of the file. Balance is 4 points head light at 330 mm, unusually high up for a light frame, which is what stops it feeling flimsy. Swingweight 292 strung — that is the number nobody looks at and everybody feels.
A 100 square inch head, 645 square centimetres, standard 27 inches.
An even 23 mm beam, flex 65, an open 16 by 19 pattern that lets the strings move and bite, tension range 48 to 57 pounds. Hy-Bor in the shaft — boron and carbon out of aerospace — puts stiffness back into the one part of a light frame that usually goes vague. Style 232046.
Auxetic 2.0 does the feel work.
A frame that light with a shaft that solid is a deliberate contradiction, and it holds.
Larissa is a town built on top of its own evidence. They were laying foundations in the centre in the 1980s and found a whole ancient theatre under the shops, raised under Antigonus Gonatas, buried for centuries, and hiding in plain sight the entire time — the kind of thing that makes a man question every pavement he has ever walked on.
You will use this racquet everywhere from a Tuesday morning ladies' session to a fast doubles set where the ball never sits up, and it is also perfect for a long evening afterwards over tsipouro and a table of small plates, which is how Larissa conducts every serious conversation it has ever had.
The lightest thing in the room is often the one that did it.
Buy on Amazon