When I first shot F-Class, way back in the early days before smaller target rings and F/TR arrived, and IIRC the year, or maybe even two years, before the first ever F-Class Championship was held in Canada in I believe 2001, so I'm talking c. 2000, like most I used whatever I had in the cabinet that was half suitable. That was a 223 Rem manual (straight-pull) AR-15 built by The UK's Southern Gun Co. with a heavy 26-inch Lilja 1:8 twist barrel and shooting Sierra 80gn MKs. Don't ask about MVs as I didn't have a chronograph as yet and borrowing one of the few around at that time wasn't an option. The load must have been very mild though based on the charge weights of VarGet and Re15 employed, and the ease with which I could pull the bolt open on fired cases. (Forget QuickLOAD and powder manufacturer's tables with test barrel pressures, straight-pull ARs give you a tremendous feel for chamber pressure given their lack of primary extraction and the hard yank needed to break the brass to chamber seal in anything approaching a full load.)
I knew its bullets had to be subsonic at longer distances - and target markers soon confirmed this - but could I find anything in books or online that cast any light on whether any design remained stable or otherwise? All I could dig out in extensive research was that some projectile shapes were stable, others weren't and there was some evidence that the early Berger VLDs outperformed tangent ogive Lapuas and Sierras ballistically (retained speed) out to what we now know would be transsonic speeds, but then slowed more rapidly, They (155gn in 308 Win) did remain stable to 1,000 yards though. So, I took my 223 to my first ever 800-1,000 yard matches with nothing better than guesstimates of suitable bullets and rather large worries about even finding the target frame. (Many, usually 308 Win shooters, attempting this in these early days simply never did find the frame at 1K and some went home with 22 misses.) People believed I was stark raving mad to even attempt this with the mouse gun and then when I managed to put in cards with reasonable but to be honest never anywhere near competitive scores some simply refused to believe it. I had some 'interesting' range house post-match conversations that usually started "Hey, is it true that you were shooting a .........?"
On paper the bullets to use were the longer higher BC VLDs but I had little success with them in either 75 or 80gn forms. The shorter blunter 80gn SMKs and similar Nosler Custom Comps did just fine even if I was regularly shooting with 10-15-MOA on the windage dial. Elevations seemed OK, but with a 2-MOA five ring (10 on US targets) the plot sheet flattered this aspect and on a range with very variable winds, it was windage that was a much greater cause for concern poroducing low value hits, no score hits, the occasional complete miss on rougher days.
In the intervening 19 or 20 years, I forgot all about those early crude attempts and their lessons mistakenly thinking they had nothing to tell me other than a 223 built for a different purpose was rather ballistically deficient at 1,000. Like many I've been caught up in the excitement and sugar-rush of ever heavier F/TR bullets, super-new designs in all calibres, BCs that we simply could never have imagined back then, and vast improvements in the supporting 'infrastructure' such as accurate average G7 values and ballistics programs that see you close on elevation on shot 1. (So much so, we now have all these forum posts demanding to know what's 'wrong' with the posted BC, ballistic app or whatever if the POI is 1-MOA 'out' at 1,200 yards.)
But now, I increasingly wonder about inherent bullet stability, and whether in the inevitable design compromises, the market demand for ever more impressive BC numerical values isn't skewing designs into territories where other basic qualities risk being compromised. I've always believed that every generation throws up outstanding bullet designs that somehow perform better than their paper specs say they should. When I started match shooting, the old rebated boat-tail Lapua D-series designs were just losing that cachet; the original 155gn (#2155) 308 was the outstanding Fullbore design of its generation - it's no coincidence the UK NRA specifies it in its contract manufactured 308 Win match ammunition even today. Yet later, it was the 155.5gn Berger BT Fullbore and 185gn Juggernaut. All of these designs seem to offer outstanding stability and consistency over a wide range of altitudes, MVs, rifling twist rates, ambient and wind conditions. I've shot 155.5s in 1:13 twists in freezing conditions through to 1:10 in the 90s F at 7,500 ft ASL at Raton in the 2013 FCWC. I once stuck that in Miller and got an Sg value above 4 IIRC, but consistency over 10 days of shooting and elevations were superb - dropped points virtually all came from my failures to cope with Raton's shifting winds!
I'm not nearly so sure that there will be many, or even any, designs from the 2015-19 period that will attract these accolades with hindsight with the possible, even very likely, exceptions of the Berger 80.5gn 224 and 200.20X 308 designs. For me, the latter is on hearsay not direct experience as I don't liked 'heavies' shooting better with 155-175gn models and anyway I can't afford to buy the darned things. (I speak of the F/TR calibres where the 223 and 308's ballistics have required boundaries to be 'pushed' very hard. In other calibres with higher BCs and/or MVs the differences seem to be smaller perhaps because bullets remain above 1,600 fps at most normal match distances ..... but then ELR is a strange, far and distant land of which I know nothing other than AS Bulletin pieces and rumours!


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