Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Speer .308 200 grain Hot-core?

Has anyone out there used this bullet on elk or similarly sized game? I've got a number them and I'm trying to decide whether I want to use them in my .300 WinMag on an upcoming hunt.

Thanks a bunch

Shot a cow elk through the lungs with one out of a 30-06 last fall. She walked 10-15 feet a fell over dead. I think they would work great out of a winnie, they are a pretty tough bullet. Load them up and go forth and kill elk.

I haven't tried a 200 but I've shot a number of elk with 180's in a 300 WSM. They work great. I shot a medium bull coming downhill toward me at about 150 yds. The bullet clipped the scapula, went through a paunch stuffed full of grass from the morning feed, hit a few other things, and I found it in the ham on the far side. It still weighed 150 gr. after all that.

I've used the 200 grain Speer/.300 Win Mag on several elk and one very large South Dakota bull bison. Worked just fine.

How was performance on the bison, if you don't mind my asking? How far was it when hit, did you recover the bullet, etc.? I'm considering using it in Africa on game in the wildebeest through eland size range so am very interested in your bison kill.

Inquiring minds want to know.

He was probably 125 yards away. Bison don't show much reaction to being shot, so I hit him twice in the lung area. He stood around for a minute or so, then finally fell over. The animal went right to the processor, and I was not able to recover the bullet.

The three or four bull elk I've shot with the 200 grain Speer were all less than 200 yard shots, and all were one-shot kills. I did recover two bullets. They both mushroomed nicely. I was using a max load of 7828 at around 2950 fps.

Thanks for the update. It was very useful.

Never used Hot Core but did use 160g Grand slams for over 20 years in my 7mm RM (and took my 2015 bull elk using one from my hunting buddy's rifle).

The 160's worked very well and I have a hard time believing a 200g Hot Core wouldn't work just as well.

Killed a spike-fork bull moose with that bullet back in the day. It died.