This year a certain little black number could upstage Maria Sharapova’s burgundy wrap dress with gold Tiffany earrings and Rafael Nadal’s $425,000 Richard Mille watch.
It’s a new black co-polyester string from Babolat, RPM Blast. While the color pick is a fashion statement and a departure from the standard off-white offering, the real beauty of RPM Blast is the way it helps turbo-charge topspin production. Like a bike wheel spinning on a Tour de France downhill run, RPM creates dizzying revolutions per minute on a tennis ball.
“The new string helps me hit deeper with more spin so I have more power,” Nadal says. ESPN analyst Brad Gilbert agrees. “It’s amazing stuff,” he says. “I wish it had been around when I was playing.”
The spin comes from a combination of the string’s octagonal shape and silicone coating. With eight edges, the string bites into the ball, much like Babolat’s Pro Hurricane co-polyester string, while the silicone coating acts like a lubricant, according to Bob Patterson, of Racquetmax.com in Birmingham, Ala. “It makes the strings slide and stay on the ball a millisecond longer,” he says. It also cuts down on the friction between main and cross strings, which helps prevent notching and premature breakage.
RPM Blast was introduced to tour players at the Australian Open in January and is just being released at retail with a suggested price of $17, plus the string job. But it’s already become the string of choice of marquee Babolat endorsers like Nadal, Andy Roddick, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Samantha Stosur.
It’s also attracted a few players sponsored by other companies who have broken ranks with their strings, according to TENNIS.com contributors and tour stringers Patterson and Nate Ferguson of Priority One Tennis in Tampa, Fla. These include Sharapova (who uses a hybrid mix of RPM Blast and Prince Natural Gut), Sam Querrey and Stanislas Wawrinka. There may be others, but only the players and their stringers and racquet sponsors know for sure, which can add a little parlor game as you watch for it at the French Open this year.
Players are also telling Patterson and Ferguson that RPM Blast is less harsh on the arm than other co-polyesters, which is probably good for Sharapova, who has a history of shoulder problems.
So while tennis fashion fans will be looking at Sharapova’s latest getup when she plays at the French, equipment geeks and serious recreational players will be ogling the black magic in her stringbed.