mes;

I understand what you are saying but he Rimfire BR shooters with high tech bolt guns with tuners continue to test ammo just as described here.

I agree with boats/JD Steelere: get a good ammo then spend time practicing whether that be offhand or bench shooting. At 200 yards, for most of us, practicing reading conditions, position, bench rechnique, etc until we can consistently shoot the best groups with THAT AMMO will let us know if another brand is really better. I will admit that the confidence factor has a lot going for it.
I have often said and will say again that most of us can pick the guys on the lineshooting the best scores, swap rifles and ammo with them and they will still beat us. The reason is smple - they have the things mentioned above down pat. I believe in ammo testing to a point but as the RF BR shooters can attest, the next lot of the same ammo will be different. Finding the most consistent brand in a particular rifle may be of more benefit.

JMHO

Don

As a follow up on the article I wrote published a few issues ago on the guns at EG (centerfire) in the Journal, I hope to do the same this next match at EG with the rimfires. Should be interesting.

I've found that in our game, shooting rimfires at 200yds, making decisions on ammo tested at anything less than 100yds is not too fruitful in weeding out good vs bad ammo. Sure, you can weed out the really bad, but the stuff that is close to the same group size can be hard to tell which is the better choice. Even making decisions at 100yds can mislead you as I have found some gun/ammo combination to be good at 100yds but terrible at 200yds. 

Case in point is that I'd tested some new Lapua Midas L & M at 100yds vs my Wolf Match Target (vintage five years old) in a BSA Mk III with 12x Unertl off the bench at our club. Shooting consisted of 10 groups, five shots each, all in the same day. Gun was cleaned between Lapua and Wolf and 20 shots fired into the dirt to "season" the barrel. Might not have to had to do this since I believe that both are made by Lapua.  The barrel was dry patched between each group. This old batch of Wolf has always been really consistent group wise for me. Anyway, based on this test I made the switch to Lapua Midas M because it showed better groups and no fliers where the Wolf did have an occasional flier, maybe one in each box of 50. 

Well, the first target at 200yds (non re-entry) I was lucky to keep 10 shots on our target! Since our club did not have a 200yd range at that time, I had no way of knowing this. Just for a sanity check, I shot another bull a few minutes later with the Wolf, after cleaning the gun, and I shot something in the 230's. 

Anyway, long story short, check out you ammo choice at the distance you shoot before declairing that X ammo is better than Y ammo!

MI-shooter