The shooting world has become completely infatuated with 6.5mm calibers over the last couple of years. Hornady may have ignited an avalanche of support when they introduced the 6.5 Creedmoor and now they have another trick up their engineering sleeves. Originally developed for match shooting, the brand new 6.5 PRC (Precision Rifle Cartridge) looks to be a scorching caliber within the 6.5mm brethren.

Neil Davies, Hornady Marketing Director, had this to state about their new kid on the block:

This new 6.5 PRC is a combined development between the desires of people in the PRS (Precision Rifle Series) world and our engineering staff. To come up with a really intelligent cartridge case design that will take advantage of everything… the Heat Shield Tip, the ELD Match, and the ELD-X bullets have to offer.

This new caliber Hornady introduced as a part of their New Products for 2018 launch. It works out of both short- and medium-length actions.

Hornady Precision Hunter 6.5 PRC 143 Grain ELD-X ammunition [Photo Credit: Hornady Facebook]

Jayden Quinlan, Hornady Ballistics Engineer, expanded upon this new caliber:

When we designed the 6.5 PRC we wanted to build an all-around system. We wanted to have high velocity, but good barrel life. We wanted to have consistent velocity and pressure performance within the case and chamber design and we wanted to be able to load bullets that were very low drag and effective at a long range.

At the moment, Hornady has one boxed offering in their Match and Precision Hunter series which will assuredly grow as popularity likely rises. These very first loads commercially developed for the new caliber are as follows:

• Match | 6.5 PRC 147 Grain ELD Match | 2,910 FPS | G1 BC 0.697 | G7 BC 0.351
• Precision Hunter | 6.5 PRC 143 Grain ELD-X | 2,960 FPS | G1 BC 0.623 | G7 BC 0.314

Neil Davies continued as to why he, and everyone at Hornady believes, they may have hit a home run with this venture:

The 6.5 bullets just all have a high BC. They’re very aerodynamically efficient so for hunting applications or match applications its just a winner all the way around.

It will be interesting to see what kind of reloading data they publish for the 6.5 PRC and what rifle companies will begin to chamber this caliber as we are entering the home stretch of what is to be unveiled at SHOW Show 2018.