In many technical applications, fibre-reinforced composites with textile high-performance fibres made of carbon or glass are being used. The fibres qualify for their high strength and stiffness due to their physical and chemical characteristics. It is necessary to guarantee a high safety level under all possible loading constellations. Besides the usual service loads, the topic of extreme loads that work along with high forces and high impact velocity is of increasing importance. For these so-called impact loads, the processes within the structural components have to be analysed and material models suitable for prognoses should be derived from them. The existence of suitable test machines and test methods is a prerequisite for that, yet for filament yarns they are not state of the art. Hence, tensile tests with high strain rates on filament yarns are performed on standard high-speed tensile testing machines. This leads to problems when analysing and interpreting the results and therefore, it is necessary to develop special testing machines for filament yarns.