Jack Draper's racquet and string setup, decoded

Here's the question most club players actually have when they see Draper crush a lefty forehand on TV: is he playing the same Dunlop FX 500 you can buy at the shop, and if you bought one, would it feel anything like what he's hitting? The honest answer is "sort of, and no" — and the gap between those two halves is where most of the interesting stuff lives.

We'll work through it.

The setup, at a glance

Per the pro-gear bundle listing (last verified May 2026), Draper's published kit looks like this:

A couple of those "not publicly confirmed" lines are doing real work, and we'll come back to them. Treat the table above as the floor of what we know; everything below is either inference or the kind of guess we'd label as such.

The question, restated

The reader's question, in full, is usually: "Jack Draper hits a heavy ball, he's left-handed, he's had wrist and shoulder issues — what frame and string is he actually using to do that, and how much of it is the retail product?"

Let's take it in two halves.

The frame: FX 500 Tour, not FX 500

The first thing worth flagging is that Draper is on the FX 500 Tour, not the standard FX 500. That distinction matters more than the shared paint job suggests.

The retail FX 500 is Dunlop's modern power-spin frame in the 100 sq in, ~300 g class — a tweener-leaning stick aimed at intermediate players who want easy depth. The Tour version of the same family is a different animal: heavier (around 305 g unstrung at retail spec), thinner in the throat, more head-light, and noticeably more demanding to swing. It's closer in feel to a traditional player's frame wearing the FX cosmetic. If you've demoed both back-to-back at a shop, you'll know the Tour requires you to bring the racquet head speed yourself; the standard FX gives it to you.

Whether Draper's actual match frame is a retail FX 500 Tour or a pro-stock layup under the same paint is not publicly confirmed. Dunlop's tour department, like Babolat's VS and Wilson's H22 program, does build custom moulds for sponsored players, and the common guess among stringers we've spoken to over the years is that most top-50 players are on something tweaked — even if the tweak is just a different layup or a custom handle pallet. We haven't seen a confirmed teardown of Draper's match frame, so we'll leave it at: the cosmetic is FX 500 Tour, the precise spec under the paint is not something we can verify from the source bundle.

What we'd guess from watching him play: the frame is almost certainly customised with lead and/or silicone to land somewhere north of 340 g strung, with a slightly more head-light balance than retail. That's typical for a tour-level baseliner who needs the stability to absorb pace on the backhand side and the swingweight to drive through a left-handed forehand at his cuts. We can't put numbers on it without a verified bag photo or stringer interview, and we're not going to invent any.

The string: a full bed, and what that says

This is the part we find more interesting than the frame, honestly. The source lists Draper on Dunlop Explosive Speed in both mains and crosses — a co-poly, full bed. No gut hybrid, no multi cross, no comfort layer.

A few things to read out of that:

It's a poly/poly bed. Plenty of tour lefties with big forehands run a natural gut main and a poly cross — Nadal being the obvious template — to get the pocketing and tension stability of gut alongside the bite of poly. Draper isn't doing that, at least not per the published spec. A full bed of co-poly is a control-and-spin choice. It dampens trampoline, it gives you predictable launch angle on heavy swings, and it asks more of the arm — which is the trade-off worth naming, given his injury history.

Explosive Speed is a shaped co-poly. Dunlop's positioning for it is essentially "spin-friendly poly without the deadest feel in the category." It's not the stiffest string in the rack, but it's not a soft poly either. Pairing it with itself, full bed, is the kind of stringbed a player picks when they want one consistent response across the whole face — no separate behaviour from mains vs crosses, no break-in mismatch.

Tension is not publicly confirmed. We'd love to give you a "23.5 kg at Indian Wells, 24 on grass" line here and we can't. The source we're working from doesn't carry a tension number, and we haven't seen a verified stringer pickup photo for Draper recently enough to put a figure on it. If you see a number floating around online, treat it as rumour unless it comes with a dated photo of the racquet ticket.

Restring frequency. Also not in the source. The tour default for a poly-using top-50 player is fresh frames every match or every other set, but we're not going to pretend we have Draper's specific routine.

What the setup tells you

Reading the dataset as a whole: Draper's stated kit is the loadout of a modern power baseliner who has decided he doesn't need a comfort layer in the stringbed to play his game. That's a real choice. It means the FX 500 Tour platform (and whatever's under the paint) is doing the comfort work — through frame weight, layup, and customisation — rather than the string job. It also means the spin and control he gets on the heavy lefty forehand are coming from the full poly bed and his own racquet head speed, not from a gut main bailing out the swing.

Among tour lefties he's a slight outlier in that respect. Most of the comparable archetype — heavy topspin forehand from the ad side — leans on a gut/poly hybrid. Draper, on the published spec, doesn't.

For a club player who admires him: the retail FX 500 Tour is a real, buyable frame and a perfectly reasonable demo if you're a strong intermediate with a fast swing. The standard FX 500 is the friendlier option if you're not. What we'd push back on, gently, is the idea of copying the full poly stringbed. A 305 g+ frame swung at club tempo plus a full bed of shaped co-poly is the classic recipe for tennis elbow — and Draper, with a pro's swing speed and a pro's recovery setup behind him, is already at the edge of what that combination asks of an arm.

Something to try this week

If the setup interests you, here's a modest version of the experiment: demo the FX 500 Tour, but ask the shop to string it as a hybrid — a soft multi or synthetic gut in the crosses, poly in the mains, around mid-range tension. You'll get a fair read on whether the frame's swingweight and stiffness suit you, without putting your elbow through the full-poly version of the test. If the frame feels good with the friendly string job, then — and only then — is it worth thinking about going closer to Draper's published bed.

That's a one-demo, one-string-job experiment. It tells you what you need to know without committing to a setup built for a different player on a different body.