The guys at Tract Optics may well be the Jeff Bezos of the sport-optics world, as they have changed the buying paradigm with their direct-to-customer sales. The company cuts out the middleman and offers high quality at a price that, in truth, seems too good to be true—but it is.
Tract has addressed the rapidly growing Precision Rifle Shooting market this year with its Toric 30 mm FFP 4-20x50 MRAD PRS riflescope. As with all its products, it uses Schott High Transmission (HT) glass. The ED Lenses are fully multicoated and the MRAD PRS reticle has matching Milliradian adjustments.
I mounted the scope on a Savage precision rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor and used it to teach the long-range stage for an NRA Women on Target event at the Hale Mountain gun range in southern Vermont. I was dialing up and down most of the day to allow them to shoot at multiple distances and the scope tracked perfectly.
A few days later, Tract co-owner Jon LaCorte drove up from his office to meet me at that range to do some formal testing, the first of which was to use a Champion Redfield Precision Sight-In Target to assess the tracking accuracy at 100 yards. The concept is to zero on the center and then dial around to each of the four corners before returning to center. In each case, the impact was less than .5 inch from the center of each diamond, which is within the tolerance of the rifle and Hornady American ammunition. The final shot was .4 inch from the first shot.
Next, we used a Box to Bench Stackable Target. This one has lines stacked up the 30-inch target in 1-mil increments. After dialing up, shoot at the aiming point at the bottom of the target and the point-of-impact should match the line on the target. We tested from zero to 6 mils and the point-of-impact was never more than .3 inch from the line, with four out of the six hitting the line. The scope returned to zero with the last shot touching the first. Considering that the gun and ammunition shot slightly more than .5 MOA, both tests were perfect.
We let the rifle cool and then shot at multiple MGM IPSC steel targets out to 500 yards, during which we were able to dial up and make first-shot impacts on the 6-inch heads, then we repeated the test using the holdover method with the MRAD Reticle. While holdover is not quite as precise as dial up, we were easily able to make first-shot impacts on the targets.
The optics are clear and crisp, and the image is quite bright. Focus is by a rapid-style ring at the rear of the scope. The illuminated reticle is controlled by a dial on the left side, and parallax adjustment is on the same turret behind and closer to the scope. Elevation and windage turrets are in .1-mil increments and can be reset to zero after sighting in the gun. There is a zero stop with the scope that can be installed and it also comes with a handy screw-on, 3-inch sunshade.
The first-focal-plane, Christmas-tree-style reticle has a floating-center dot and uses .2-mil windage-correction hold points. They are easy to see and should work well for windage correction or for moving targets. The descending vertical leg of the reticle has hash marks in .5-mil intervals and each one also has windage lines.
Overall, this scope is well thought out and well made. It represents an excellent choice for the serious long-range shooter but best of all, with a $1,294 price tag, it’s about half the price of a comparable scope.
