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I do enjoy a very dampened feel, but the Pure Drive just seemed way at the other end of the scale, as the ball just trampolines off the strings. They have dampened the feel of this racket with the Cortex technology, but it still felt way too pingy for my liking. I started out on the backhand side and while the easy power and spin was fairly helpful, I didn’t really enjoy the feel of the Pure Drive. It’s got great manoeuvrability that encourages you to use everything it’s got. It became clear immediately on the groundstrokes that this racket gives you a whole lot of power and spin.
BABOLAT PURE DRIVE 2011 HOW TO
So, with the warm-up out the way, and having finally figured out how to play with this racket, we set about upping the intensity and giving the Pure Drive a thorough workout. I wouldn’t want to be using this racket as a counter puncher, as you have to put so much into every ball to get the most out of the Pure Drive. If you don’t get a lot of racket head speed and whip up and over the ball, then you’re going to find you ping a lot of balls long. While the Pure Drive has great spin potential, you need to use all of that and more to keep the ball in the court. If you don’t put everything through the ball you can struggle greatly for control. It occurred to me that the Pure Drive is well suited to a very aggressive baseliner. The 16 x 19 string pattern on the Pure Drive launches the ball at a much higher angle than the Pure Strike and it has a lot more power, so to start with, balls were flying long on every shot.Īlthough the Pure Drive does offer easy topspin, I had to focus most of my attention on getting topspin, because otherwise, I would simply miss every ball long.įor me, hitting with spin comes easily, so once I figured out what needed to be done with the Pure Drive it actually turned into quite a good playtest. I can’t see this dampening the Pure Drive too much, as it has always had a very responsive feel, but hopefully, it should help lessen the load players are putting on their arms.Ĭoming from the Pure Strike 18 x 20 to the Pure Drive, which has a much more open 16 x 19 string pattern was quite a big change for me and it took a good amount of time to get dialed into this racket. In line with the modern trend for slightly more dampened rackets, Babolat has introduced Cortex, its new dampening system, so the 2018 Pure Drive should absorb vibrations slightly better than previous rackets. This 2018 version has introduced FSI Power Technology, which slightly changes the design of the grommets, and increases the spacing between the swing to give this racket yet more power potential.