Review: CZ 75 Czechmate 9mm race gun

I would rarely describe a $7700 semi-auto 9mm pistol as great value but I’ve tested the CZ 75 Czechmate and can say that you get an awful lot of gun for your money.

Before you dismiss me as either crazy or having more money than sense, let’s look at the exact and very narrow purpose of this exceptional pistol. From top to bottom, it and all the accessories included in the package are designed and built for Open Class competition in IPSC and other Action pistol disciplines.

This is a level of competition where outstanding shooters compete at state, national and international levels and it requires specialised, seriously high-quality firearms before you can even hope to be competitive.

So the Czechmate is no entry-level pistol — not the one you buy for low-level fun club shoots. It’s a specialist tool for a high-level and very demanding sport that tests the reliability of firearms to the ragged edge, with competitors routinely firing over 50,000 rounds a year in order to stay at the top of their game.

If you have not ever seen a Open Division IPSC match it is pretty exciting to watch. The action is very fast, every moment. Search for “open division IPSC” on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.

When I agreed to do this review I was under the impression it was to be one of CZ’s regular line of Shadow 2 type pistols, but when I picked up the package at Cleaver’s they informed me that this was a very different level of firearm.

The Czechmate is also now discontinued by CZ, but there are enough still on sale in Australia to make it worthwhile having a close look at it.

The CZ Czechmate is sold as a ready-to-compete package right out of the box, already factory fitted with everything needed to drive straight to the range and jump into competition.

In the package you get your pistol plus optics and mount, compensator and ‘gas pedal’, a cleaning rod and oil, plus four magazines and a magazine loader so you don’t get sore thumbs loading them all. There is also a set of bolt-on iron sights so you can use the Czechmate in other competitions and for more general use.

This package was obviously designed by competitive shooters for competitive shooters and is the most complete and well thought out package I have seen anywhere for this level of shooter.

THE EXPERT OPINION

I have shot a reasonable number of IPSC and Action pistol events, but only at local club level and I have never competed at Open level, so to be honest I felt a bit overwhelmed and decided to visit one of Australia’s top Open Class pistol builders, a man who has built guns for leading Australian and international competitors as well as competed in the past at a high level himself.

Victor Olivera, of Victor Precision (victorprecision.com) produces astonishingly high quality competition pistols that can cost several times what this CZ does so I was very interested to get a genuine expert to give me his thoughts on this very specialised factory pistol.

Victor was kind enough to spend nearly an hour with me and the CZ. He stripped it down and looked into every nook and cranny, pointing out various features. I began to understand the care and attention that had gone into building it.

“You can clearly see that CZ put a lot of expert hand-fitting into this,” he said. “In fact, I would say it is exceptional quality for a factory product and the value at $7700 is off the charts.”

He went on to say that, yes, you truly could take this to the range, add in a belt and holster and lots of ammunition and happily begin competing straight away.

I put more than 300 rounds through the Czechmate over the next week. I deliberately used everything from various weights of decent factory ammo to some old reloads that are underpowered and often cause malfunctions in other guns. Not the CZ. I could not get this thing to malfunction.

I shot it from every position possible, mixed up ammo types in a single magazine, never cleaned it and tried anything else I could think of, yet it never even looked like stumbling. I would have to say function was flawless.

Normally, the CZ 75 line of pistols are a double-action trigger design, meaning your first shot is from a long, heavy trigger pull and then after the first shot it changes to single-action with a much shorter and crisper trigger pull. That is not ideal for high-level competition so CZ completely reworked the trigger in the Czechmate so it is a single-action only mechanism, giving you the same short, crisp and very light trigger pull for every round. This is very helpful to both accuracy and speed on target.

Speaking of triggers, it is truly that “glass rod breaking” that people speak of, a totally smooth, very short take-up with a wall that then breaks the shot at a consistent sub-2lb (9000 grams) weight. It’s the best factory semi-auto pistol trigger I have ever felt, the equal of a good custom trigger and a joy to use. I wanted to sit there and dry fire it over and over so I could experience the joy of such an excellent trigger.

ACCURACY

One of the reasons that CZ 75/Shadow handguns are so loved by top competitors is their accuracy. The accuracy comes in part because of the somewhat unusual feature that the slide rides inside the frame, unlike 90% of other semi-autos. It provides a much longer contact area between slide and frame, so when fitted correctly it reduces slide-to-frame wobble, improving accuracy.

This is the first 9mm semi-auto I have ever shot under 1” (25mm) groups at 25 metres off the bench. The Czechmate is a tack driver as well as being highly reliable.

I shot it quite a bit at 50 metres, consistently hitting the 6” (15cm) steel gong and forming some impressive offhand groups on it as well.

The weight of the CZ, at around 1.4kg (50oz), makes recoil a breeze, with the combination of weight, the amazing compensator and the normal comfortable grip shape of all the CZ line keeps the sights coming back on target almost automatically after each shot, seemingly urging me to shoot faster and faster.

That’s especially so with the ‘gas pedal’ in place. It is a thumb rest mounted onto the side of the frame-mounted optic so your thumb is also helping keep the gun on target during fast action sessions.

THE OPTICS

The Czechmate comes fitted with the long-time standard of competition red-dot sights, the C-More frame mounted sight. It works well and has a long history of being a very reliable performer, although it may be a little dated given some of the recent entries into the red-dot space.

Competitive shooters have in the past preferred frame mounts for their optics, both for accuracy and speed (your sight is fixed and does not move back and forth with the slide) and also for reliability as earlier red dots could not take the recoil of tens of thousands of full-power loads, dying very quickly and at the worst possible moment in competition.

This is now changing and today you will see both frame- and slide-mounted optics used in competition. The Czechmate is configured with a frame-mounted setup from the factory but it is only a matter of minutes to convert it to either iron sights or to a slide-mounted red dot if you wish. It is like having a Lego gun that is very user adaptable for many situations.

Australian law limits magazines to 10 rounds so that is the magazine size supplied. The mags all work well. They are easy to load with the loader, but a bit stiff to hand-fill to capacity, which is a fault of all reduced-capacity magazines because the makers are terrified of a heavy-handed official somewhere managing to force that deadly extra one round into their magazine and then banning, so they leave no space for that to occur, resulting that tough-to-load 10th round syndrome.

My thumbs appreciated the standard-issue mag filler CZ provides.

So what we have is a single-action 9mm hammer-fired handgun that is configured specifically to help you win competitions without needing to befriend an expert gunsmith.

It works very, very well and does so at a price well below what you will spend to have a race gun built for you. It is a seriously impressive piece of gear that will serve anyone starting out in this area of competition well indeed.

SPECIFICATIONS