I bought two of the Rem. 700 Classics in .221 the year they were chambered in it. Long time ago, wanting to say they were almost a year late. I know I had them ordered for a long time before they showed up.
One, I never even put a round of .221 in, just pulled the barrel off it right out of the box and had the action blueprinted and a new Lilja in .17 Mach IV spun on. I still have that one. It feeds the .17 Mach IV real nice.
The other, I shot as a .221 for quite awhile. Had to have the chamber re-cut, the factory chamber was literally the worst chamber I had ever seen or worked with. Brass came out of it egg shaped. It was so bad there was almost not enough shank to get a good .221 reamer to clean it all up. Actually, couldn't quite get ALL of it cleaned up, tiny bit of old chamber remained, but just a teeny tiny bit. Rifle looked kind of funny when it was done with so much cut off the back of a factory sporter barrel. I pillar bedded it and floated it and tuned up the trigger and that was the most accurate "factory" rifle I have ever owned. It functioned real nice with the .221 too.
Ended up parting that one out when I did a big purge. Sold all the parts except the barrel - nobody wanted to buy it because of the re-chamber that had been done. So I sold the unfired .221 barrel from the other rifle along with that action. Still have that re-chambered barrel, in case I ever want to screw it on to an action and play with the .221 again. Still have all the brass and dies and a bunch of RL-7 for it too.
Anyway... If you were to stumble across one of those Classics, both mine functioned just fine. They did/do have the ejector clocked differently than a standard 700 bolt and had blocked up magazines too.
- DAA