Sprint Filter P08 Air Filter for Road & Track – BMW K 1600 GTL (2010–2018) PM187S

The GTL is built around the person on the back. Seat, backrest, luggage, the way the fairing moves air across two people instead of one: it is a passenger's specification, and it sets an unusual test for anything fitted near the intake. The right result is that nobody in the saddle can tell. PM187S passes that test by being what it is: a dry woven panel in the space the paper element vacated, with no change to the noise the engine makes, the way it picks up, or how it starts on a cold morning.

Key Features

• Dry woven polyester, single layer, with no oil on it when new and none added later
• Aperture 80 µm, flow rated at 5,050 l/m²/sec — the standard road and track medium
• Sits inside the closed series airbox, so the induction note the pillion hears is unchanged
• About double the filtering surface of a typical performance element in the same frame size
• Quoted retention of 93.13 per cent against 100-micron test particles
• Cleaned with compressed air rather than bought again; life-of-machine design, two-year warranty

Judged by what it does not do

Intake parts that announce themselves are a category of their own, and none belongs on a machine like this. Induction roar is a poor thing to add when someone is being asked to sit behind you for six hours. Nothing in this element is designed to be heard: it goes inside the closed standard airbox and alters neither the volume of that box nor the route air takes to reach it. The benefit on offer is the quiet kind — the same motorcycle, with one component behaving better as the kilometres accumulate.

The part of the trade that is real

Honesty first: no element inside a standard airbox makes a standard GTL noticeably faster, and on a loaded touring machine the notion barely means anything. The genuine gain is an intake restriction that starts low and stays there between services instead of drifting upward, plus a component that comes back from a wash rather than a bin. On a motorcycle whose life is measured in long journeys, that is a small repeated saving of the sort the GTL was designed around.

Care and cleaning

Compressed air aimed at the clean side does the routine work on a PM187S: the dust leaves along the path it arrived by instead of being pressed deeper in. Twice a year, or after a wet and gritty run, warm water with a little mild detergent and a patient rinse takes off what air leaves behind. It then wants time and moving air and nothing else — no oven, no hairdryer, no flame, each of which destroys the polyester it is made from. Refit it dry and unoiled, exactly as it came. Sprint Filter's maintenance sheet sits in the Downloads tab.

Fitment & Compatibility

For the BMW K 1600 GTL built between 2010 and 2018, as a straight exchange in the standard airbox with no work on the housing. Nine model years is a long run for a flagship, and when a used machine changes hands the registration document settles which variant is in front of you. Four differently equipped K 1600 motorcycles were built on this one housing, and all four are named with their years under the Fitment tab.