Three hundred grams, folks, and if you are wondering whether that is a lot, so was I, so I picked up my phone and my phone is about two hundred, which means this racquet weighs one and a half phones. That is the metric system, everybody. That is what we fought for.
Three hundred grams unstrung, ten and a half ounces. A 645 square centimetre head, which is a hundred square inches — a full-size, forgiving stringbed. Length 685 millimetres, the standard twenty-seven inches.
Now the real numbers, and they are good ones.
Balance at 320 millimetres, which is more even than the lighter Fire, because at three hundred grams the frame does not need mass thrown out to the tip to have presence. The beam is 24.5, 25 and 24.5 millimetres through the hoop — thick, stiff, energetic — and the string pattern is 16×19, the open one, which means more bite on the ball for spin.
X-DAMP is the Fire line's damping technology, and it is the joke at the heart of this frame: a thick powerful beam usually means a harsh one, and this is the version where somebody actually did something about it. That is not a flaw. That is a hobby.
It arrives unstrung, in white, which means you get to have an argument about string with a man in a shop.
Jaffa is a tough crowd. There is a clock tower at the gate of the old town, put up by the Ottomans, and a mosque with a fountain built into the street wall so people could drink on their way past — which is the single most considerate piece of urban design I have come across. St Peter's looks down over the harbour.
And out in the water sits Andromeda's Rock, where Perseus is supposed to have cut her loose from the chains, which is a rescue story so dramatic that the rock is still trading on it three thousand years later. Now that is a career.
One and a half phones. That is the whole review. Everything else is detail.
Buy on Amazon