In this article, a response of the complex-phase high-strength steel SZBS800 was modelled by considering the strain-rate influence. The material's response was first measured with a series of standard tensile tests at lower strain rates. Higher strain rates were achieved using the unconventional test of shooting the ball into flat specimens. A viscoplastic formulation of the Cowper-Symonds material model was applied to consider the strain-rate effects. The parameters , , and of the material model were estimated using a step-wise procedure. First, rough estimates of the three parameters were obtained from the tensile tests using the grid search method. Then, the parameters and were fine-tuned using the reverse engineering approach. With the help of explicit dynamic simulations and all the experimental data, a multi-criteria cost function was defined and applied to obtain a smooth response function for the parameters and . Its optimum was determined by a real-valued genetic algorithm. The optimal values of the estimated parameters model the material response well, although a domain of optimum candidates spans two orders of magnitude for the parameter and a few orders of magnitude for the parameter .