2006 International Tactical Rifleman's Championships (ITRC)

Background

Bret Heidkamp and Henning Wallgren partnered this year to assault the ITRC match. Both have strong IPSC backgrounds, Henning being a multi-time Euro champ and Bret staying stateside.  Bret shoots long range regularly, and is currently shooting a 260 Ackley Improved built for him by GA Precision on a Remington short action.  It wears an AICS chassis system stock, and a 5-25 PMII Schmidt & Bender.

Henning fielded an Alexander Arms 6.5 Grendel upper for long range duties, and used his EAA open gun for pistol.  Bret used a rather worn 223 (some would say, beater) upper for the short range gully course.  Both wore special packs built by Mystery Ranch for the long courses, and short range gear by Blackhawk! and Bridger Armory for the short range duties.  All gear performed 110% with zero failures.

The ITRC is a challenging match with 3 days of field courses.  This year there were 32 teams.  Two long range courses and one short range course comprise the event.  Plus a team-on-team points shootoff, and an "egg shoot" for a rifle.  No helicopter event this year.  Long range scoring is +40 for a hit, -20 for a miss.  Carbine is +10 for a hit, -20 for a miss.  Unlimited number of shots allowed.  Gully course: +1 for hits, max 2 points, no miss penalties.

Here is Bret's account of the saga: 

Day 1:  We drew a 7am start time, pretty much ideal anywhere.  However, this being in Gillette, the wind had already picked up!   We started on the Arvada course, which is a fairly flat course with some decent long shots, and a 60 minute par time.  The round count was approx. 62 long range and 56 short range.

Our RO rode in a Jeep, while we jogged.  Thankfully, he stayed far enough ahead so we didn’t suck any exhaust!  We wore custom long range packs from Mystery Ranch (and a HUGE thank you to Dana and crew!) that worked great.  More on these later.

Most of this course was straightforward.  The last shooting position had 17 long range targets (that’s 34 shots minimum) all in a row.  Thank goodness I’m using a barrel that’s .98 at the muzzle, and heavily fluted.  That rifle didn’t wander an inch.

The end of this course we shot 2000 points or so.  We thought we blew it totally, because we did have some trouble on a few targets.  We thought we should have been closer to 2800 points if we didn’t go nuts with some misses.  It certainly wasn’t what we had planned.  As part of a fix, we decided to switch to the 223 upper for the next long range course.  The next team down from us that day was 980 points for the course, which made us feel a little better, but we still beat ourselves up quite a bit about it.                       Day 2  click on the smaller "next page" below.

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