Sprint Filter P08 Air Filter for Road & Track – BMW F 700 GS (2011–2018) PM35S

Nothing about the F 700 GS was drawn for a desert. Cast wheels instead of spoked ones, a lower seat, road rubber as standard: BMW built it as the tarmac half of the F range, and most have spent their years commuting and touring. Worth saying before a filter is chosen: the load a road-going intake gathers is not the mineral powder such arguments are usually built around. It is finer, mixed and seasonal, and it behaves differently in the weave.

Key Features

• Woven polyester in a single layer, delivered dry and kept that way — no oil when new, none after cleaning
• P08 specification: 80 µm openings at a rated 5,050 l/m²/sec, drawn up for road and track use
• Thread gauge starts at ø 22 microns — the filtering is done by the gaps, not by the strands
• Close to double the filtering cloth of other performance elements, folded into the original frame
• Takes the paper panel's place in an untouched airbox: no cutting, no spacers, no fuelling changes
• Serviced and returned to the bike instead of thrown away, under a two-year guarantee from purchase

What a road-going intake actually swallows

Pollen in spring, insects through the whole warm half of the year, traffic soot, and the fine particulate a wet motorway lifts off its own surface. None of that is the dry, loose powder of a gravel road. Powder sits on a weave and can be blown straight back off it; a summer of insects and pollen leaves something that clings, and air alone will not always take it. There a washable medium has a second method in reserve and paper has none — paper loads in one direction only, and the end of that direction is a bin.

The honest size of the benefit

A panel inside the series airbox does not make a standard F 700 GS noticeably stronger, and no element ever has: intake, injection and exhaust were homologated together with a filter already sitting in the box. What changes is the shape of the interval: resistance starts low, climbs as the element loads, and comes back down at a wash instead of drifting until a replacement is due. Sprint Filter's own comparison puts the dry P08 at 93.13 per cent retention of 100-micron test particles against 76.42 per cent for four-layer oiled cotton.

Care and cleaning

Start with an air line, held against the clean face so the loading leaves the way it arrived. Where a summer has left a residue that will not lift, hand-warm water with a little mild detergent dissolves it; rinse until nothing more colours the water. Then let the PM35S dry by evaporation and give it the time that needs — radiators, hot-air guns and flames all distort polyester — and refit it dry, with nothing applied. Sprint Filter's care leaflet is attached under Downloads.

Fitment & Compatibility

Catalogued for the BMW F 700 GS of the 2011 to 2018 model years, seated in the unmodified series airbox in place of the original panel. Ten machines from two makes share this housing, the faired 800s that preceded the GS and a Husqvarna Nuda among them; all are named with their years under the Fitment tab.