The Rimfire Report: Is CCI’s Uppercut A Knockout 22LR Cartridge?

Defensive 22LR ammunition is something that I thought might die out, but it turns out I was woefully wrong. Instead, a lot of new cartridges have recently come out from common rimfire offenders like CCI, who are now producing the new jacketed CCI Uppercut 32 gr HP cartridge. After my recent trip to the CCI plant in Lewiston, Idaho, I was able to sneak away with a handful of boxes of the stuff for testing here on The Rimfire Report, so today we’re going to do exactly that. In addition to a test with the routine Angstdt RPR, we’ll also be putting the ammo through an old favorite, the Ruger Lite Rack 22LR pocket pistol.

CCI’s Uppercut 22LR Ammo Overview

Product Link: https://www.cci-ammunition.com/rimfire/cci/uppercut/6-960CC.html

Protection should always be personal. Built for how you carry. Crafted for how you defend. Sized to match any shooter. CCI® Uppercut™ answers that call with power and performance traditional 22 rimfire ammunition has never been able to deliver. The difference lies in its exclusive projectile. Unlike the simple lead round nose or copper-plated hollow points typical of most rimfire ammunition, Uppercut’s jacketed hollow point bullet features nose skiving that initiates full and reliable expansion while retaining the weight needed to hit critical penetration depths. Plus, CCI’s legendary priming ensures it will always be ready when needed.

First CCI rimfire rounds designed for defense

Jacketed hollow-point bullet

Nose skiving ensures petals peel back for uniform and consistent expansion

Penetrates to recommended depths

Extremely reliable CCI priming and propellant

22 LR velocity optimized for performance through semi-automatic handguns with 2.5- to 4-inch barrels

Velocity optimized for performance through semi-automatic handguns with 2.5- to 4-inch barrels

Unwaxed bullet reduces fouling and improves feeding in all temperatures

CCI makes an important note that these are CCI’s first rounds designed for defense rather than precision, recreation, or hunting. However, this isn’t their first time making a defensive round since they’ve got Speer right next door to lean on for that expertise. But that begs the question: Is this a real jacketed hollow point? Every piece of CCI's own marketing calls Uppercut a "Jacketed Hollow Point" with nose skiving for petal-style expansion while retaining weight for penetration depth. The 22 WMR Uppercut variant is likewise described as a jacketed hollow-point bullet with nose skiving for reliable expansion.

But in comments given around the launch, CCI's Aaron Slinkard said the product's main draw is its plating thickness, and optimization for short pistol barrels. The presser for the ammo also said that CCI's typical 22 LR bullets like the Mini-Mag line use only a thin flash plate that needs a wax coating, whereas Uppercut carries a heavy copper plating measuring six thousandths of an inch. I can confirm this thickness because, as we’ll discover later, this ammo doesn’t play well with every chamber.

So is it a real jacketed hollow point? Strictly speaking, no, it's more like a heavy copper plating. But at the end of the day, the 32-grain Uppercut is a copper-clad bullet with far more copper than a standard flash-plated bulk .22. According to some of the engineers I spoke to at CCI, Uppercut was and is built specifically to hold together and petal open on impact rather than just resist barrel leading. Whether you call that "jacketed" is a semantics call CCI has made in its favor because it seems to achieve its stated goal if my experience at their on-site range was any indication.

Uppercut claims that it expands without shedding its jacket, but is there a limit to that? The short answer is a resounding maybe, but the real answer is I think it most often is going to be no, at least with most off-the-shelf guns. Both of the rifles we were shooting were pretty common, a 10/22 and a CZ 457, so the ballistic results here have to be taken with the knowledge that these are screaming out of the barrel compared to their advertised velocity. I’d be hard-pressed to find a longer barrel that would maybe push this round’s velocity a touch higher, causing the round to fracture rather than mushroom.

Velocity Results

This time I felt it would be wrong not to test the ammo out of a short pistol, since it says it's optimized for them right on the box. For this job, I chose the Ruger LCP II Lite Rack 22LR, which has a 2.75” barrel, just a quarter inch longer than the minimum length this ammo is designed for. On that note, the Lite Rack/ammo combo gave us slightly higher velocities than advertised, which coincidentally seems to make the rather finicky Lite Rack run a bit better in terms of cycling reliably. I also had a chance to run a few mags of this stuff through an FRT-equipped TX-22, and it seemed to run pretty well in that gun too, which typically only runs well with mini-mags and the like. The Literack gave us a standard deviation of 40 fps, and an extreme spread of 166 fps. No rounds ever approached supersonic velocity out of the Lite Rack.

Out of the Angstadt RPR, and its longer but ported 18” match barrel, this ammo takes on an entirely different form. It achieved an average velocity of 1,376 fps, with a peak velocity of just a touch over 1,400 fps! The bolt action likely also gave the ammo a bit of extra consistency in velocity, producing an SD of just 12.8 fps, and an extreme spread of only 52.9 fps. While pretty fast, these are much better numbers from a ballistics perspective, especially considering this is likely slower than the velocities we saw in the testing out of the CZ and 10/22 at CCI, and this means that the ammo is capable of both achieving higher velocities while still opening up and maintaining its whole mass.

When it comes to the Angstadt RPR, we got a nice set of 5 groups that I’d say are all conducive to this ammo's claim to be defensive in nature. If you can get an ammo to be accurate and reliable, it just needs to be powerful enough to stop the threat you’re defending against. The largest group was a bit oblong with one I threw hard right, but other than that I was satisfied overall with the accuracy from this cartridge out of the RPR. Of course, like all of our groups out of the RPR on The Rimfire Report, these were done at 50 yards.

The combination of a non-fracturing high-velocity hollow point that expands and penetrates deeper means that in the right hands, this very accurate round should prove itself to be quite an effective critter getter out of any meaningfully accurate rifle. Another weird benefit, especially out of a pistol, is that its odd power-to-weight ratio means that in guns like an FRT-equipped TX-22, you’re still able to stay dead quiet suppressed, while still giving the FRT system the extra force needed to work properly.

All in all, I think that CCI Uppercut 22 grain Hollow Point is a pretty good cartridge overall. While not the optimal nor the economical choice, it's consistent enough out of enough firearms in all the places it matters, and out of the right guns it's particularly good as a stand-in for some other specialized rounds. The biggest downside is, of course, its cost, $14 per box of 50. At $0.28 per round, this kind of puts the wallet sting of centerfire back into rimfire, and that’s the kind of money I’d rather spend on shooting my big guns. Would love to hear your thoughts on this one! As always, thanks for stopping by to read The Rimfire Report, and we’ll see you all again next week.