Volkl C10 Pro 2022 Tennis Racquet
About Chandigarh
This planned city sits at the foot of the Shivalik hills, serving as the capital of both Punjab and Haryana while forming a union territory of its own. It was laid out after Partition, when Lahore was no longer available as Punjab’s capital, and its grid of sectors and civic buildings came from the postwar planning led by Le Corbusier.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
The Volkl C10 Pro is a heavy players’ frame that has run essentially unchanged for more than twenty-five years, updated in cosmetics rather than in specification. The 2022 release is the black and yellow livery of that frame.
Weight is the argument.
At 330 grams unstrung and around 349 strung it is genuinely heavy in an era of light racquets, and mass is what blunts an opponent’s pace and sends a defensive ball back as an offensive one.
Balance is 8 points head light, which puts that mass behind the hand: the frame reads as substantial on paper and swings far more freely than the number suggests, at a swingweight of 326 that is moderate for its class.
The beam is a constant 20 mm — rare among modern frames, most of which taper — and the layup is flexible at RA 62. It bends into the ball, holds it, and gives it back, which is where the plushness C10 players talk about comes from. The 16×19 pattern keeps spin available.
The trade is plain: the racquet must be swung, and it supplies no power that is not brought to it.
Chandigarh runs very hot in the long weeks before the monsoon breaks, and a 330-gram frame is a fitness decision there as much as a technical one.
Specifications
| Head size | 98 sq in |
|---|---|
| Unstrung weight | 330 g / 11.6 oz |
| Strung weight | approx. 349 g / 12.3 oz |
| Balance | 31 cm, 8 points head light |
| Swingweight | 326 |
| Beam | 20 mm constant |
| Length | 27 in |
| String pattern | 16 x 19 |
| Stiffness | RA 62 |
| Composition | Graphite |
| Grip sizes | 4 1/8 – 4 5/8 |
| Colourway | Black / Yellow |
LET Volkl C10 Pro 2022 Tennis Racquet SHOW YOU Chandigarh
Racquet: The attribution on this file is wrong in almost every guidebook printed, and wrong attributions are the one thing that genuinely upsets me. Everyone catalogues it under Le Corbusier. The correct provenance is longer. The master plan came from Albert Mayer, working with Matthew Nowicki; Nowicki was killed in a plane crash in 1950, and the commission then passed to Le Corbusier, who rearranged the whole thing into the grid you are standing in. So the accession record for this city ought to read: Mayer and Nowicki, superseded, following an air disaster. The Assembly's curved roof, the parasol shell over the High Court, the Open Hand in its forum - all of it downstream of one aircraft. Cross-reference it properly and the buildings change shape in your head. That is what a good index does to a person.
Racquet: Now here is a holding that entered the collection sideways, and those are always my favourites. Nek Chand, a road inspector, began building this in the late 1950s in a forest buffer zone where construction was flatly illegal. He worked at night, for years, out of rubble from the villages the new city had demolished - so the material provenance is impeccable and the permission is entirely absent. The authorities located it in 1975 and found eighteen acres of it. Eighteen. And rather than bulldoze, they opened it to the public in 1976 and put him on the payroll to carry on. Consider the paperwork involved. An item catalogued as contraband, reclassified as the city's most loved place, with not a single line of the original entry still true. I get shivers.
Racquet: Filed under natural features, incorrectly, by very nearly everybody. This lake is man-made, created in the late 1950s by damming a seasonal stream off the Shivaliks, on Le Corbusier's insistence that the city required water for the eye. And then comes the addendum, which is where the real story always lives. It silted up badly, because those hills shed soil like almost nothing else, so the entire catchment upstream had to be planted and engineered simply to keep the lake in existence. A body of water dependent on a forest dependent on a policy: three documents, not one, and only the first ever gets quoted. The correct viewpoint, incidentally, is the far bund rather than the boat club - a detail omitted from every summary I have ever had to correct.
Racquet: The description on the card says sculpture. The description on the card is insufficient. This is the official emblem of the city and Le Corbusier's own symbol, open to give and open to receive, fourteen metres of sheet metal set in a sunken forum designed for the public to assemble in. It also turns in the wind, like a weathervane - a fact universally missed, because people work from photographs, and a photograph of a moving object is a record of one second filed as a record of the thing. And the date: erected in the 1980s, well after his death. Not by him. Everybody gets that wrong too, in print, repeatedly. I do not, and I have made my peace with being the only person at the party who cares.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.