Lapua .243 Winchester

Lapua is renowned in Australia and abroad as a manufacturer of choice reloading components and ammunition. To quote the Lapua website, the company is devoted to ‘premium quality small calibre ammunition for target shooters, hunters and law enforcement authorities’.

They have passion for precision – a policy that they clearly embrace and put into their products. More correctly, Lapua is Nammo Lapua Oy and Nammo Schönebeck, which is part of the larger corporate Nammo Group. Nammo Lapua is located in, and named after, the town of Lapua in Finland. The Australian distributor for Lapua is NIOA, who kindly supplied some ammo for testing.

These days, I have given up handloading and use factory ammo for my shooting and hunting. So it was that I headed off to the SSAA range to test the 100-grain soft-point Lapua .243 Winchester factory loading. The Lapua fact sheet states a muzzle velocity of 2691fps for this round.

As with other Scandinavian ammunition manufacturers, the .243 Winchester hunting ammo is targeted at birds and medium game. That infers a softer lead projectile designed for quick expansion on medium game. It’s suitable for use on wild dogs, pigs, goats and smaller deer species but not so much full-grown stags and large boars. I fired a series of three-shot groups and, to no surprise, the grouping was consistent and around the 1 MOA benchmark.

Naturally, Lapua offer a lot more than just .243 Winchester. Their larger calibre hunting loads are specifically aimed at bigger game such as moose, bears and musk oxen. Lapua offer three types of projectile loadings – sport, hunting and tactical – in 17 popular rifle calibres ranging from .222 Rem up to 9.3×62 and including, of course, the .338 Lapua Magnum.

Most of their popular hunting calibres consist of FMJ, conventional soft-point and their Naturalis pure copper polymer-tip. In long-range calibres there is a greater array, with a selection of boat-tailed projectiles in hollow-point and FMJ options.   .