Take it out
Lift the tank or pull the airbox lid and lift the element clear. Note which way round it sat — the pleats have a direction.
Sprint Filter · The intake story
The filter you
never oil
Every other performance filter asks you to wash it, dry it and re-oil it. Sprint Filter’s answer is a single sheet of micro-calibrated polyester — and a blast of compressed air.
SINCE 1952 · DRY POLYESTER
ONE SHEET · NEVER OILED
Shop Sprint Filter →ONE SHEET · NEVER OILED
Start here
Everything goes through it.
An engine is an air pump. A litre-class sportbike at full song swallows well over a thousand litres of air a minute, and every one of them arrives through a single component about the size of a paperback. You choose your fuel. You choose your oil. Air is simply whatever the filter lets past — and whatever it lets past is what the combustion chamber has to live with. That makes the filter one of the few parts on a motorcycle asked to do two jobs that pull against each other: pass as much air as possible, and stop as much dirt as possible. Every air filter ever made is a position on that trade-off. What separates them is how honestly they hold it.
The material
One layer, not a stack.
The classic performance filter is layered cotton gauze held between wire mesh and wetted with tacky oil: dirt sticks to the oil rather than to the weave. It works, and K&N, BMC and DNA have each built it into a serious engineering discipline. It also means the filter’s behaviour depends on something that happens in your garage — how evenly you re-oiled it after the last clean. Foam takes a different road again; open-cell sponge filters well but compresses unevenly under suction. Sprint Filter took the third road. One sheet of polyester, woven to a set aperture, filtering dry. Nothing is layered, so nothing overlaps into a thick spot that flows badly beside a thin spot that filters badly. Nothing is oiled, so nothing depends on your last service. And where an OEM paper element loses its shape as it loads up — the pleats buckling into an irregular wall — the polyester keeps the pleat it was pressed with.
The measurement
Calibrated is a measurable word.
“High flow” is marketing. An aperture in micrometres is a number somebody had to measure. Sprint Filter builds its media to a stated opening and publishes the figure for each one, which is what lets it quote both a filtration rating and an airflow rating for the same cloth instead of asking you to take the trade-off on trust. The road-and-track P08 is rated at 80 microns and a guaranteed 5,050 litres per square metre per second. The racing P08F1-85 is woven from polyester threads starting at ø 22 microns — not, as it is often misquoted, an 85-micron pore. Both that weave and the water-resistant P037 are patented. The practical upshot is that the filter you fit today behaves the same on its ten-thousandth kilometre as it did on its first, because there is no oil film in the middle of the equation to thin out, migrate or be reapplied by hand.
The P08, by the numbers
1952Founded, in Italy
2×Filter area vs other sport filters
80µmRated particle filtration
5,050Litres per m² per second
The fit
It goes back in the box.
There is a version of intake tuning that means binning the airbox, bolting on a cone filter and paying someone to re-map the ECU afterwards. This is not that. A Sprint Filter is cut to the outline of the original element and drops into the original housing — same box, same seal, same lid, same intake path. The gain is inside that outline: the pleats are packed to roughly double the filtering surface of other special filters, so an identical footprint presents far more cloth to the incoming air. Nothing upstream or downstream changes shape, which is why the manufacturer says even its racing P08F1-85 runs on road vehicles without a remap. It also means the whole thing is reversible. If you ever want the paper element back, that is a one-minute job and a lid.
Choosing
Five media. One belongs on your bike.
- P08 — road & trackThe orange weave, and the one most riders are looking for. 80-micron filtration with a rated 5,050 l/m²·sec of airflow — the everyday balance of breathing and protection. 938 of the Sprint Filters we stock are P08.
- P037 — water resistantThe patented waterproof weave: 37 microns, 4,500 l/m²·sec. Built for rain, spray and grit, and the one to fit if your riding season does not stop for weather.
- P14 Dust Guard — hard conditions14 microns at 1,800 l/m²·sec, and by the maker’s account the only dry filter rated for genuinely dirty air without oil additives. Gravel roads, dry summers, long adventure miles.
- T12 Max Defense — off-road & extreme7 microns, 560 l/m²·sec. Deliberately the most restrictive medium in the range, because in enduro and desert air it is the dust that ends engines, not a few missing litres of flow. There is a whole article on the T12 if that is your kind of riding.
- P08F1-85 — racingThe black weave: polyester threads from ø 22 microns and, the company says, the highest permeability of any filter on the market. Patented, developed with factory teams, and usable on the road without a remap.
The record
Seventy years, and a paddock habit.
Sprint Filter dates to 1952, which by its own account makes it the oldest specialist air-filter manufacturer in the world. It began in Italy, around Milan, and today runs from Riga in Latvia, where its filters have been produced since 2014. What has stayed constant is the customer list. Ducati has fitted Sprint Filter since 2013 and Aprilia Racing since 2015; KTM ran them in Moto3 from 2014 to 2016; MV Agusta and Energica’s MotoE machines followed. Away from two wheels the same polyester turns up in the Honda Civic Type R TCR and in Alfa Romeo and Toyota touring cars. The company puts its own share of the MotoGP paddock at more than 70% of teams — its figure rather than an independent one, but the OEM contracts underneath it are a matter of record.
Maintenance
Four minutes, once a season.
Blow it through
Compressed air from the clean side outward, against the direction the engine draws. Most of what it has collected leaves in seconds.
Only if it is filthy
Soak it in household detergent, rinse until the water runs clear, then let it air-dry completely. No heat gun, no compressed air to hurry it along.
Never oil it
This is the one instruction the manufacturer prints in capitals. Oil on a dry polyester weave blocks the calibrated apertures the whole design is built around. Refit it dry, and do this again in 10,000–15,000 km.
In the Inter-Pace catalogue.
Eight of the 1,400 Sprint Filter elements we stock: P08 in orange, the black F1-85 racing weave, the carbon-framed P037, and the white P14 and T12 media. Every one is cut for a specific machine.
A filter you never oil is a filter you can never get wrong.
No re-oiling, no drying time, no guessing how much was too much.
The cheapest horsepower on a motorcycle is the air it was already trying to breathe.
The verdict
1,400 filters. One is cut for your bike.
Every Sprint Filter we stock is model-specific — the right outline, the right weave, dropping straight into the standard airbox. Save your bike in the Garage and the catalogue only ever shows you what actually fits it.
Shop Sprint FilterFiltration and airflow figures are the manufacturer’s own. Check fitment for your model on the Sprint Filter collection, or browse every air filter we stock. Technical and racing photography courtesy of Sprint Filter.