Sprint Filter P14 Air Filter for Dusty Conditions – Zontes ZT 250-R (2019–2021) SM277P14

It is easy to read the P14 as a tighter version of the P08, the same cloth pulled closer together. It is nothing of the sort. The two elements offered for this airbox are made of different materials by different methods: one a woven fabric with a repeating opening across a flat face, the other a dry special nonwoven — fibres laid down in a random mat with real thickness to it. On the ZT 250-R, the smallest machine on this filter's list, that distinction is worth grasping before the ratings are.

Key Features

• Dry special nonwoven medium, rated at 14 microns of filtration
• Flow rated at 1,800 litres per square metre per second, against 5,050 for the woven P08 in the very same housing
• Around twice the filtering area of an ordinary performance element, folded into the standard airbox
• Goes in where the series paper panel comes out — nothing cut, no adaptor, no remap
• Dry when it is made and dry when it is refitted; oil plays no part at any stage
• Cleaned with compressed air and used again, for as long as the bike runs; two years of warranty from purchase

A mat, not a mesh

A woven medium does its work at a surface. Air travels through openings of a known size, and whatever is stopped is stopped on the face of the cloth or against the threads it brushes past. A nonwoven has no repeating opening to quote, because there is no repeat: the fibres cross one another at random and in layers, so the route through is a maze instead of a hole. A particle can clear the first fibres and still be held several layers deep. That is how 14 microns is reached without simply pulling a weave tighter and tighter, and why this is a different type of filter rather than a finer grade of the other.

What the change costs

Retention is always bought with flow, and the published figures say by how much: 1,800 litres per square metre per second here, 5,050 for the P08. The reserve is handed back on purpose. It also needs saying plainly that none of this makes a standard ZT 250-R quicker — a slot-in element does not add power to a production motorcycle, and this medium gives away intake headroom besides. What you get instead is a finer specification between the road and the inlet tract, on a machine whose airbox was drawn around engines a hundred cubic centimetres larger.

Care and cleaning

Routine servicing is compressed air: hold the line to the clean face and drive the dust back out along the path it took coming in. Where a deposit is greasy rather than dry, lukewarm water with a mild detergent will release it, and the medium is rinsed until nothing more washes out. It dries in moving air at room temperature and only there — no heat gun, no flame — and the SM277P14 goes back into the housing dry, with nothing applied. Sprint Filter's maintenance sheet is in the Downloads tab of this page.

Fitment & Compatibility

Sprint Filter lists this P14 for the Zontes ZT 250-R of 2019 to 2021. Eight more Zontes machines — three in the 310 class, five in the 350 — share the identical code, nine entries in total. Buy on the code, then confirm the build year.