The 300WM is a pussy cat. The recoil is not that bad. I can put 60 down range and not even have a bruise on my shoulder. I am 50 years old and close to crippled compared to my youth. Been shooting the 300WM for hunting and long range work and reloading for it since 1995. I got my son a light weight 300WM when he said he wanted to go Elk hunting.
Is it the best choice by todays standards for long range competition? No! Can it still be very competitive you bet your Douluth Trading Company underware it can be! The trick is choosing a chamber reamer that is designed for precision shooting combined with really good reloading habits! You do not want a SAAMI chamber reamer. In the past when I was running a 300WM for long range target shooting I went SAAMI minimum then throated for the bullet I wanted to run. There are better options today as I understand it.
In the right hands the 300WM set a lot of records in the past. Just like with the right bullet it is a devasting hunting cartridge. Since I have not competed with a 300WM since 2007 I am not up to scratch on modern trends but I still hunt with one.
Handling recoil is more mental than physical combined with good diet and a little bit of exercise. Technique plays a role too their are tiny littlle women that shoot big bore hand guns and hadle it better than most men. It was not that long ago when most men where 5'5" to 5'8" and 145lbs. and these guys went to war with a 30-06. A lot of us shot NRA High Power with a 30-06 in all postions.
Look at what guys do today with long barreled 308Win in F-TR! Between the long barrels, faster twist rates, modern bullet designs and powder! It ain't your Dad's or Grandfathers 7,62 NATO or 308Win!
Read the article on the Mk248 Mod 1 or Mk248.1 as a starting point. Keep in mind this is not ammo loaded by someone competing and was not designed to be either just a military cartridge to reach out and kill humans at long ranges with far less weight than a 338LM weapons platform!
Your allowed a 10kg rifle. That much mass mitagates a lot of recoil. Some of that weight should be ballast so you can always shed a few ounces should your scale differ from the scale in use at the match.
So while I do not think 300WM is the ideal cartridge I would not let it deter me. When you burn out the barrel if you do not like it easy to go a different direction and just build yourself a hunting rig and reuse the brass, bullets and dies for hunting. Let's face it competing with a magnum or cartridge with magnum like performance is going to burn through barrels at the level of competition and volume fire and fast strings!
My draw to the Win Mag in F-Class had to do with brass unavailability in the RSAUM. It was a withering commercial round about 4 years ago, but it was fantastic in Fclass. I had seen brass limitations with the 300 WSM as well, and I frankly didn’t want to reward Norma for cancelling perfectly fine 7 RSAUM brass, (soft headed if being picky) by ordering many thousands of WSM cases at $2.50 a piece, at least, fighting over another small supply.
Additionally, the RSAUM was shooting inside 300 WSM loads. I knew there was a WSM 7 option, but the truth is several of us had already blown up EOL 195’s, and I had no headroom with the smaller Saum, so faster 195’s were not a prudent option. Brass paucity issues remained as well, with it. 30 cal barrel life was claimed to be better.
About the time saum brass supplies were truly insufferable, the 250 A-Tip was out. A lot of guys don’t realize that this bullet wiped out the feasibility of .338 diameter 300 grain bullets in bullseye competition. I used the Lapua Mag with 300 grain bullets, and it already drifted more than 195’s shot in anything. But 250 A-Tips’ BC smoked every possible combo in the Lapua Mag including the 300 A-Tips, in the wind, so badly that mine are all dormant. This remains true of current bullet options (solids, maybe, aside).
To me, the 250 A-Tip required exploitation, and the cartridge, like the powder, would be the variable. As you say, we have enough weight at our disposal to tame 30 cal recoil. The questions for me were do I want to pay somewhat more for bullets, powder and maybe barrels. Am I confident that the bullet shoots small.
The 250’s will shoot as small at 200 yards as 180 hybrids will, and A-Tips are about unbeatable on comparators. When I saw this, it answered the other questions about cost. We already spend so much to travel around doing this, what matters to us is points on the card. 215’s score great, provided you aim at the right spot, but to have the same leeway, they need to go something like 3,450 FPS.
All scores will eventually be wind call limited with all shooters once they iron out all physical and mechanical issues. You can improve wind skills, you can move closer to the target, or you can block the wind.
Shooting higher BC is functionally no different than moving closer to the target, blocking the wind is hard to get away with, and I will posit that just as there is some mathematical expression, some amount of weight on the barbell, and some time on the mile run, there IS a level of wind reading talent that we just aren’t getting past, at least any faster than the other guy has progressed.
The Win Mag had a following in match use in the 70’s and maybe a while beyond, and this seemed reinforced when I debated options, from the number of old 40-X’s chambered for it, but not many if any larger than it, that I was seeing for sale and collecting.
Hornady had already released the 300 PRC. This was a tough call, because the Hornady 250 A-Tip seemed a natural fit. But on closer examination it is a shorter column, and when we use the slowest powders to minimize peak pressure spiking with the heaviest bullets, a stretched column is more conducive to progressively building up pressure slowly.
Also, circling back to the beginning, I think if a brass maker exists, it’s going to make 300 Win Mag, and because it’s a crowded market, the price will be fair, from now to the end of guns.
I don’t think a bigger cartridge would help, like the Norma Mag. I already work hard to mitigate barrel heat. And by “heat” I mean just regular Fclass temperatures. I actually need to shoot below saum temperatures to be reasonably sure that a bullet won’t blow up. I coat the bullets and often spray the barrel. I think that is more an A-Tip need than a Win Mag cartridge issue. The mod 2 runs a lot more H-1000 than I do with my heavier bullets. I’m at or just under 2,750 FPS.
It’s hard to say what is ideal. The 308 in very good hands usually splits F-Open at the middle of page one, sometimes much higher up than that. I’m beginning to see a better LR potential for me, than my other calibers delivered, definitely when it’s a challenging wind day.