As it’s off-season, I’ve had some time to experiment with some new rubbers, so this time I decided to test TSP Ventus Speed, which I had never tried before.

Here is the manufacturer’s description:

Ventus Speed is the hardest and fastest variant of the TSP Ventus series. When designing this offensive rubber, the Japanese rubber experts focused on perfect balance between high speed, maximum spin development and great control. The open-pore 45° sponge of Ventus Speed features the new “Optimized Rotation Concept” and is truly made for spin. Thanks the new sponge design, this new TSP development guarantees longer ball contact which results in more rotational energy transfer on the ball. In addition, the higher trajectory resulting from the “Optimized Rotation Concept” provides for great feel and more control in your play. The fast performance top rubber sheet of Ventus Speed develops tons of power and tremendous drive both for aggressive opening loops and mid-distance topspin attacks. Ventus Speed is a highly balanced offensive rubber offering great value for money.

The Ventus Speed is an ESN Tensor released about 2 years ago. Since I forgot to take a picture before I glued this rubber onto my bat, I’ll post someone else’s picture that I found on the net

 

Topsheet feels soft and very grippy, but not highly lively like some of the latest generation Tensors. In fact it reminded me more of a traditional ‘natural rubber’ topsheet instead of the synthetic and tension ones. This might be the reason of the high durability that some others have mentioned.
This property felt like an advantage for serving and pushing, where the spin was very good, and it was easy to keep the ball short.
For brush looping the rubber did not feel that fast (for a Tensor), and the spin was high but not extreme. It felt more direct in that a faster brush resulted in high spin accordingly, not like the highly tensioned rubber that can result in extreme just at the right brushing speed (which has pros and cons).

It wasn’t until I started looping hard, and digging the ball into the sponge, that the familiar Tensor boost kicked in, resulting in very good speed and plenty of spin. Until you really powerloop, the rubber felt a little muted to me and not as crisp as I’d like it to be as it is at higher speed. I would expect this rubber to perform much better on a harder (and composite) blade resulting in a much crisper feel over most of the power range. The Trinity carbon that I was using has quite a soft feel and the carbon layers are buried deep in the plies, resulting in a softer feel, and the crisp feel did not appear till I looped really hard or smashed, and the familiar cracking sound appears.

The throw of the rubber is high, which I really like. This tends to make it much easier to lift backspin to produce high spin loops. It tends to take less effort counterlooping as well. Counterlooping was really god actually, producing a fast and very spinny loop and kicked off very low off the table.

Blocking and the short game all felt very controlled, and the rubber is relatively insensitive to incoming spin, much closer to something like Mark V than Tenergy.

So if you like high throw rubbers, and looking for something with good spin and control, especially in the short game, this rubber may be a good choice. As I mentioned I would recommend to use it on a harder blade as it’s going to feel a lot crisper for looping.
Durability has been reported to be very good, but it’s too early to tell for my sheet as I’ve only used it for 3 session, but zero signs of wear so far. Here is my sheet after 3 sessions: