First Look: Winchester Super Match Ammo Gets a 4,000-Round Workout

Winchester’s new competition ammunition line covers pistol, rifle and shotshell loads. We got an early chance to put a lot of it downrange.

Smith & Wesson and Winchester Ammunition hosted me at the Smith & Wesson Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee, for an early hands-on look at several new products. Day One of the two-day event focused squarely on Winchester’s new competition ammunition line: Super Match.

If you shoot competition—whether it’s USPSA, IDPA, 3-Gun, precision rifle or high-volume steel matches—you know what you’re looking for in ammunition. You need accuracy you can trust, reliability that holds up as the round count climbs and a price that doesn’t make every practice session painful.

Winchester built Super Match around those priorities.

The new line covers centerfire pistol, centerfire rifle and shotshell loads, with offerings aimed at everything from action-pistol competition to precision rifle shooting. Throughout the day, we ran Super Match through a variety of Smith & Wesson firearms, including pistols, shotguns, bolt guns, modern sporting rifles, rimfires and several models that had not yet reached the broader market.

And we ran a lot of it.

Winchester Built Super Match for Competition

Winchester says its engineers worked with competitive shooters while developing the new ammunition.

“Super Match is the answer for the competitive shooter,” said Kyle Masinelli, vice president of manufacturing at Winchester Ammunition. “The extensive line covers needs for all categories of dynamic action shooting competition, and delivers exceptional accuracy, reliability, and consistency.”

The line goes well beyond simply putting match bullets into existing loads. Winchester highlighted changes intended specifically for competition guns and the conditions competitors encounter.

One of the most interesting involves the primers.

Softer Primers for Tuned Competition Guns

Serious competitors often modify their firearms with lighter springs, different strikers, tuned triggers and other changes designed to improve performance. One possible downside is that reduced spring or striker force can make reliable primer ignition more challenging.

Winchester designed Super Match pistol ammunition with high-sensitivity primers intended to improve ignition reliability in tuned competition guns.

Our first day on the range gave us a substantial, although admittedly informal, opportunity to see how the ammunition performed.

Twelve shooters collectively fired roughly 4,000 rounds of Super Match during the day. We experienced no failures to fire, failures to feed or other malfunctions during that shooting.

That doesn’t replace controlled long-term testing, but 4,000 trouble-free rounds is a noteworthy first impression.

By the end of the day, my hands were tired and sore. The ammunition hadn’t given us a reason to stop.

How Super Match Handled the Heat

Winchester also says Super Match uses powder selected to reduce velocity changes as temperatures fluctuate.

Conditions gave us an opportunity to conduct an interesting real-world comparison.

Temperatures reached about 95 degrees under full sun. We left some loaded magazines exposed to the sun while keeping other ammunition in the shade. The sun-baked ammunition eventually became almost too hot to handle.

Another contributor had brought a chronograph, so we fired both the hot ammunition and the cooler rounds across it.

The velocity difference between the two groups remained under 20 fps.

This wasn’t a laboratory test, and the sample wasn’t large enough to draw sweeping conclusions about temperature stability. Still, seeing such a small difference between ammunition subjected to noticeably different temperatures was encouraging.

For competitive shooters, consistency matters. A load that behaves similarly during a cool morning stage and a hot afternoon stage removes one more variable from the equation.

Super Match Centerfire Pistol Loads

The Super Match centerfire pistol lineup includes both round-nose and flat-nose bullets in several weights. Winchester says the round-nose loads are designed with reliable cycling in mind, while flat-nose options give competitors another projectile configuration for accuracy-focused applications.

All pistol loads use Winchester’s high-sensitivity primers and are configured around minor or major competition power factors.

Centerfire Pistol

Super Match Centerfire Rifle Loads

Winchester’s rifle lineup covers both dynamic shooting and precision-rifle applications.

The .223 Rem. and 5.56 NATO offerings use heavier-for-caliber boattail hollow-point bullets. Precision loads are offered in .308 Win., 7.62 NATO, 6.5 Creedmoor, 6.5 PRC and 6 ARC.

Several loads use Winchester’s new BC Max polymer-tipped projectile. The company says the bullet was developed using new manufacturing equipment intended to improve bullet-to-bullet consistency while providing the highest ballistic coefficient currently offered by Winchester.

Rifle

Super Match Shotshell Loads

The initial Super Match shotshell lineup includes a No. 7½ target load, a nine-pellet 00 buckshot load and a 1-ounce rifled slug.

Winchester uses thick-walled hulls and high-brass heads intended to help the shells maintain their shape when used in box-magazine-fed shotguns.

Shotshell

Running Super Match Through the New Smith & Wesson Guns

The ammunition wasn’t the only new product on the range.

Smith & Wesson had a broad selection of firearms available, and we ran Super Match through several of them during the day. That included new M&P rifles, lever actions, the M&P Metal 2.0 and one particularly interesting 300 Blackout AXE SBR.

The short-barreled AXE uses a modified gas system intended to reduce the amount of gas directed back toward the shooter.

Anyone who has spent time behind a suppressed short-barreled rifle knows the problem. Depending on the gun and suppressor combination, gas and burnt powder can come directly back toward the shooter’s face.

That wasn’t my experience with the AXE. Even suppressed, I noticed remarkably little gas coming back at me. The rifle ran without issue during the shooting I did with it and left a strong first impression.

We’ll take a deeper look at the new Smith & Wesson firearms separately rather than trying to turn an ammunition story into a catalog of everything on the firing line.

What 4,000 Rounds Told Us—and What They Didn’t

The first day with Winchester Super Match was primarily about volume, reliability and initial impressions.

Roughly 4,000 rounds fired by 12 shooters without a malfunction is a strong start. The informal hot-ammo comparison also gave us an intriguing first look at Winchester’s claims about velocity consistency as temperatures change.

What we don’t have yet is the other half of the equation: controlled accuracy testing.

That’s important. Ammunition carrying the Super Match name ultimately has to do more than run reliably. It has to group.

Our next round of testing will focus much more heavily on accuracy, including shooting groups and looking at how the various Super Match loads perform when precision matters more than simply keeping the guns running.

Based on the first day, Winchester appears to have the reliability part of the equation headed in the right direction. The next question is whether Super Match can live up to its name on paper.