[SHOT 2026] Is Mimic’s Speed9 A Gimmick?

At SHOT Show Industry Day at the Range I was excited to see Mimic Firearms were attending and as soon as I finished covering the First Shot of SHOT and catching up with Christian Craighead at the Steyr lane I headed straight to Mimic to check out their Speed9 carbine.

The Speed9 features an interesting proprietary magazine set up. The magazine has two 30-round double stack magazines orientated back to back. This gives you 60 rounds on the weapon in a form factor and size not too different to a 30-round STANAG magazine. Mimic call it ‘the next evolution of the PCC’.

I ran a couple of strings, first three rounds in each magazine stack and then five rounds in each magazine stack. The motion of dropping the magazine when the first stack ran dry, turning it around in your hand and then reinserting the magazine with the fresh stack in the feed position felt a little strange but even after doing it just a couple of times I could see how muscle memory would kick in. My only concern here is that with most shooters used to conventional magazine drills, learning a new drill might cause some momentary confusion/hesitation when running a conventional magazine AR again. That’s probably something you’d only find out for sure after spending time with the Speed9. 

The concept behind the Speed9 has been tried before. During World War Two a Czech refugee named Josef Vesely developed a series of submachine guns which utilised a 60 round magazine that has two stacks of 9mm. The magazine had a mechanism which held the rear stack of rounds depressed allowing the bolt to travel over it and feed ammunition from the front stack. Once the front stack was empty the follower tripped a lever and allowed the rear stack to move up into the feed position. Very clever engineering but a little complicated for wartime. The Speed9 simplifies Vesely’s concept and puts it into a popular platform that everyone understands. And while the Speed9 adds the extra step of removing, turning and reloading the magazine this simplifies the engineering and helps reliability.