Sprint Filter P08 Air Filter for Road & Track – Honda Grom (2014–2019) PM180S

Few motorcycles are taken apart as often as this one. The first-generation Grom is the small bike an entire aftermarket scene grew up around: bars, seats, wheels, paint, exhausts, lighting. Almost every part an owner picks for a Grom is one somebody else can see. The Sprint Filter P08 PM180S is the opposite sort of purchase: it sits inside a closed airbox and changes nothing about how the bike looks or sounds. The case for it is a maintenance case — an intake element that is cleaned and put back rather than binned, holding an airflow restriction that stays where it started instead of creeping upwards between services.

Key Features

• Dry-filtering woven polyester, never oiled, so no film can lift off and travel downstream
• The surface actually doing the work is around double that of other performance elements
• An 80-micron weave with a rated flow of 5,050 litres per square metre per second
• Polyester yarn of 22 microns diameter and upwards — a figure describing the thread, not the mesh
• Sits in the standard airbox in place of the paper element: nothing cut, nothing remapped
• Washed and back on the bike the same day; two years of cover from the date of purchase

Dry polyester where the reflex is oiled cotton

In small-bike tuning the default performance filter is oiled cotton gauze, and the assumption riding along is that a freer filter must be a dirtier one. Sprint Filter's comparison measurements say otherwise: the P08 holds back 93.13 per cent of 100-micron particles, against 76.42 per cent for four-layer oiled cotton. The dry weave keeps more out, not less. It also keeps oil out of the equation, which matters on a motorcycle where everything downstream of the airbox sits close by.

A generation that stopped being current, not being ridden

Honda closed this version out in 2019 and moved on. The bikes did not: first-generation Groms are still ridden daily, still traded, still rebuilt. What changes once a model leaves the range is how owners think about consumables: a bike that is no longer new quietly starts collecting the cheapest service parts on the shelf. An element built to stay with the bike turns that around, because it is bought once, for a motorcycle with years still in front of it. It is also indifferent to what the rest of the build has become: as long as the standard airbox is fitted, this is the element that belongs in it.

Care and cleaning

All of it is done dry. Compressed air is the routine: aim it at the clean face so the dirt leaves the way it came in. A wash in lukewarm water with a little mild detergent suits an element that has had a hard season; rinse until the water runs clear. Let it dry in still air alone — no hairdryer, no heat gun, no flame — and refit only when it is dry the whole way through. The maintenance sheet for the PM180S is in the Downloads tab.

Fitment & Compatibility

Made for the Honda Grom of 2014 to 2019. The same element covers the MSX125 of 2013 to 2019, this machine under Honda's other model name, so two entries appear for what is one airbox. Both are set out in the Fitment tab.