The Rimfire Report: Sellier & Bellot Club 40 Grain Tested
Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report! I’ve been getting some fresh new batches of different ammo for testing, so this week we’ll be checking out a rarity over here in the States – Sellier & Bellot Club 40 Grain 22LR.
Sellier & Bellot (S&B) is a Czech ammo manufacturer originally founded by a Franco-German Businessman Louis Sellier in 1825 along with Jean Maria Nicolaus Bellot. Based in Prague, S&B would first establish themselves by manufacturing percussion caps at the request of then-Emperor Francis I of Austria. Just five years later, S&B had established itself as an international dealer in percussion caps and this early success would lead to their first subsidiary that focused entirely on contained metallic cartridges – a new technology at the time. Nearly 200 years later S&B is not only still around, they make some of the industry’s most well-loved ammunition including their Club 40 grain 22LR. Today we’ll go over this ammo to give you guys an overview of its shot-to-shot consistency and its accuracy potential and performance out of my Bergara B14R.
More Rimfire Report @ TFB:
The Rimfire Report: NRL22 – The Poor Man’s Precision Shooting Sport The Rimfire Report: Is .21 Sharp Taking Rimfire Anywhere New? The Rimfire Report: The Last Quackenbush – Bicycle Rifle
Rimfire Report: Sellier & Bellot Club 40 Grain Overview
Product Overview – Sellier & Bellot Club 40 Grain 22LR
Product Link: https://www.sellierbellot.us/products/rimfire-ammunition/detail/102/
NEW CARTRIDGE MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY | Sellier & Bellot launches a brand new, modern technology for the manufacture of 22 Long Rifle cartridges. | Highly accurate bullets with a new design:
Manufactured from precision, graphite-coated lead slugConsistently precise bullet shape down to one hundredth of a millimetrePrecise bullet weight within a tolerance of ± 0.02 gSuperior loadingMinimum differences in bullet speedExact primer dose within ± 0.002 gPropellants within ± 0.01 gCLUB version: Cartridges in this series achieve excellent accuracy due to new manufacturing technology
While I’d love to give you some hard data on where you can actually buy this stuff – the truth is you can’t – at least not online. Nearly every online retailer I’ve managed to find that has this stuff listed on their website is selling it for about $5.00 per box ($0.10 per round) but it’s never in stock. I happened to snag two boxes of it off of a hardware store shelf a couple of months back and was disappointed to learn that it has disappeared from American warehouses and can only be found in a few brick-and-mortar stores. It’s interesting to note that Club 40 Grain isn’t listed as match-grade ammo at all, but I think you’ll find its performance to be more than qualifying for that title.
Velocity Data
With the 18” barrel on our Bergara B14R, we should be seeing a decrease in the advertised 1070 fps muzzle velocity. In stark contrast to the typical 20” test barrel length for 22LR, S&B has a 27-½” test barrel length which seems absurdly long to me. Anyhow, the data I gathered on my Garmin Xero C1 Pro chronograph was probably the most impressive out of any of the Rimfire ammunitions we’ve tested on TFB so far.
A standard deviation of just 10 fps and an extreme spread of 40.8 fps is beyond the performance of some much more expensive match ammo we’ve tested before. I am uncertain if I have just discovered the best bang-for-buck match ammo out there, or if the prices listed on all the sites I’ve checked are just flat-out wrong. Ideally, this very good performance on the numbers side should also translate to the accuracy side as well – at least if I can put in a good performance on my part.
Accuracy Data
I think the target speaks for itself but in case it doesn’t – this ammo is not only very consistent from a velocity aspect, it’s also extremely accurate. Even though a good majority of the shots breached the typical 1100 fps threshold for supersonic speed, at the altitude I’ve been shooting at lately the speed of sound is much closer to 1115 fps so only a few of these shots broke the sound barrier and I think that’s also reflected in what we see in my five sets of 10 round groups. Once again these were all taken at 50 yards shooting from the prone position with a bipod.
Overall I’m very satisfied with how accurate the ammo has been out of the Bergara B14R. You’ll notice that all of the groups seem to favor a little low and left from my intended point of aim (with the center target being the top-center edge of the red square). This is because I first zeroed the rifle with the very similar CCI Standard Velocity 40grain – and it seems that the S&B ammo just tends to favor a little lower and a little left out of my rifle.
Final Thoughts
Unfortunately, this ammunition isn’t more popular in the United States which is weird, especially given its typical asking price. Although it’s not labeled as “match” ammo, S&B makes it clear they’re aiming for that level of performance, and the groups and chronograph data I’ve seen suggest they’re delivering—at a budget-friendly cost. Comparing this directly to something similar, like CCI Green Tag, I’ve noticed better results from European-made S&B than from many American match options I’ve tested so far. It really makes me question what we’re missing on this side of the pond when it comes to producing both affordable and higher-quality match-grade rounds for the rimfire market. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this—let me know below. Thanks for reading The Rimfire Report, and I’ll see you all again next week!