The Rimfire Report: Federal Champion 22WMR 40gr FMJ - Tested

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report! In this ongoing series, we discuss everything from rimfire history, ammunition reviews, shooting sports, and, of course, all of the cool guns, both new and old, that this narrow slice of the greater firearms world has to offer. Today, we’re getting back to some ammunition testing, this time with some .22 WMR from Federal. Federal’s Champion 40gr is advertised as a more affordable 22 WMR offering, suitable for training and target shooting, versus the varmint role that the cartridge normally plays. Today, we’ll take a look at its performance with the new Bergara BMR-X Carbon to see how it holds up in our standard series of tests.

More Rimfire Report @ TFB:

• The Rimfire Report: Daisy 2202 .22 LR Rifle – BB to Rimfire
• The Rimfire Report: The FRW Taquito 22 - The Silent Sizzle of 22LR
• The Rimfire Report: On the Range with the Bergara BMR Carbon .17 HMR

The Rimfire Report: Federal Champion 22WMR 40gr FMJ - Tested

Product Overview

Product Link: https://www.federalpremium.com/rimfire/champion/champion-training---rimfire/11-737.html

Plinking. Targets. Competition. Training. Whatever rimfire pursuit drives you, you'll get accurate, affordable performance with Federal® Champion™ rimfire ammunition. The reliable bullet, priming and brass are suited to a wide variety of rimfire range applications.

• Accurate
• Consistent and reliable
• Affordably priced
• Federal® brass,bullet and priming
• Caliber: 22 WMR
• Grain Weight: 40
• Bullet Style: Full Metal Jacket
• Muzzle Velocity: 1880
• Ballistic Coefficient: .111
• Package Quantity: 50
• Usage: Target Shooting
• Price Per Box: $19.99 ($0.40 cpr)

Federal Champion 22WMR is one of five total offerings that Federal has in the caliber. It sits as the sole “target” ammo in the lineup with Federal’s Small Game 50gr JHP, Speer TNT 30gr JHP, and  Punch 45gr all being dedicated to more lethal pursuits. In addition to being on the more affordable side, Champion 22WMR sits in the middle of the pack in terms of velocity, with the Speer TNT and Small Game loads rounding out the upper and lower ends of the velocity scale. But how does the round in the real world stack up to its claims on the website?

Velocity Data

Once again, we’ve made use of the Garmin Xero C1 Pro chronograph to gather our velocity data. One thing I will note is that this test was done with a completely new rifle, and because of this, it took a couple of magazines before the rifle started to put together more coherent groups. This is something that in the past I might have neglected to do with some other test rifles and ammo, and in the future I’ll have to do a better job of making sure to properly “season the barrel” before I get to the serious accuracy testing. To keep things fair between the .17HMR and the .22WMR variants of the BMR-X carbon rifles, I went ahead and used the same Harris-style bipod and optic (a Maven CRS.1 3-12x40 SFP) that were used in that test.

Our data from this 50-round string demonstrates that the ammo is reaching above its target velocity of 1880 fps on a regular basis. A handful of rounds even approached close to 2,000 fps. Our extreme spread was quite high, and this, combined with our fairly good standard deviation of 28.3 fps, should give us a very predictable level of performance. The only improvement I’d like to see out of this ammo is that one round that dipped below the advertised velocity  - compared to the other rounds in the string, this one was almost a full 100 fps slower than the average.

Accuracy Data

If the accuracy of the  .17 HMR version of the BMR-X with its Hornady ammo was anything to go by, the 22WMR version of the rifle does just about as good with Federal Champion. Most of these groups were more or less about 1” in size, with a few rounds from each group straying either above or below the main group - this I would chalk up to velocity variations, as the horizontal straining was much tighter than our vertical.

As always, we can probably squeeze more performance out of both the rifle and the cartridge if we had a better shooter, better weather, and a higher magnification optic. However, given that this setup is how I’d typically run a bolt-action varmint rifle, I think that I’d be more than happy with this level of accuracy if eliminating pests on the homestead were my main goal. As a target round, I’m certain both the numbers from the cartridge and the accuracy from the rifle are more than sufficient to perform alongside all but the most accurate of shooters.

Final Thoughts

22WMR is a cartridge that we don’t see too often. Alongside .17 HMR, 22 WMR shares a somewhat type-cast fate as being only a varmint round. However, there is something quite satisfying about shooting and plinking with these much more potent rimfire cartridges. At $0.30 per round ( distributor price), Federal Champion 22 WMR 40 grain isn’t cheap, but it’s also not quite as expensive as .223 or 5.56, and also doesn’t suffer from a lot of the regulatory limitations that bottleneck cartridges do when it comes to hunting and pest control in most states. In a word, I think Federal Champion .22 WMR is great. It’s a great addition to the Champion line of rimfire target ammo, and I hope to see more offerings added to that same lineup that might offer shooters either a more affordable or a better-performing round, perhaps a subsonic 22WMR?