Sprint Filter has been selected by JAS Motorsport as the original equipment air filter supplier for TENSEI, the first true supercar the Italian constructor has ever built. For Sprint Filter, the significance of this milestone goes beyond a single project: it marks the company’s entry into automotive OE supply on a four-wheel platform, extending a position it has held for years in the motorcycle world, where Sprint Filter is the only performance air filter manufacturer supplied as original equipment across multiple motorcycle brands.
Twenty years of technical partnership
The relationship between Sprint Filter and JAS Motorsport is not new. It is the result of a technical partnership that spans more than two decades, built race by race, season by season, across the touring car and motorsport programs that have defined JAS Motorsport’s engineering reputation. Over that time, Sprint Filter has supplied the filtration systems that JAS teams have relied on under competition conditions, where reliability and airflow performance are tested at their limit, run after run.
That history is the reason Sprint Filter is on TENSEI. JAS Motorsport did not select a filter for this project through a standard sourcing process: it chose the supplier whose products have already proven, over twenty years of racing, to deliver the reliability and the top-level performance the team needed. Being chosen as OE supplier for a manufacturer’s first true supercar, by a partner with two decades of direct competition experience with its products, is a different kind of validation than qualifying for a specification sheet. It is trust earned on track, carried onto the road.
From Motorcycles to a Supercar
Sprint Filter’s OE position in the motorcycle world was itself built on the same principle: filtration performance validated in the most demanding conditions, across multiple manufacturers and racing programs, before being adopted as factory-fitted equipment. TENSEI is the point where that same standard crosses into the automotive world, and it does so at the most demanding possible starting point: not a volume model, but an exclusive, low-volume supercar where every component is chosen individually and expected to perform without compromise.
The car built around that standard
TENSEI itself is the first road-going high-performance model designed by Pininfarina for JAS Motorsport, and the first supercar the constructor has built entirely from a clean sheet on the architecture of the original Honda NSX. Each car starts from an original NA1 or NA2 NSX chassis supplied by the customer and is rebuilt around a naturally aspirated 3.5-liter V6, developed with the British engineering house Judd Power and re-engineered with lightweight components validated through dynamometer and on-track testing. Reported output is 425 CV (approximately 419 HP) and 350 Nm of torque, delivered through a six-speed manual gearbox, with no electronic driving aids between the driver and the mechanical package. The name itself, Tensei, means rebirth in Japanese: a return to analog, mechanical driving, built in carbon fiber at the JAS Motorsport atelier in Arluno, near Milan, in a production run the constructor describes as ultra-limited.
Sprint Filter’s P037 media protects that engine at the intake: a single-layer polyester dry filtering medium, requiring no oil and no washing, with filtration efficiency that does not decline over the life of the filter and cleaning that requires nothing more than compressed air. On a naturally aspirated, high-revving unit built for a small number of demanding owners, that consistency is not a marginal specification. It is the reason Sprint Filter was chosen.
Engineered for the conditions that matter
P037 was selected specifically for the level of engine protection it guarantees under conditions that go beyond ordinary road use: dust, moisture, and the wide range of climates a car like TENSEI will be driven in around the world. Sprint Filter’s polyester media is waterproof, a property no competing performance air filter on the market can offer, and one that becomes decisive in dusty environments or adverse weather, where filtration cannot be allowed to compromise engine protection even for a moment. For a manufacturer building a small number of cars to the highest possible standard, that margin of protection was not a detail. It was part of the specification.
What this means going forward
TENSEI is Sprint Filter’s first OE fitment on a car, and it opens on exactly the platform that best represents what Sprint Filter’s technology is built for: a low-volume, uncompromising, performance-first project, engineered by a partner who has tested Sprint Filter’s products under competition conditions for twenty years before entrusting them with a car carrying its own name. It is a starting point, not an isolated result, and it confirms a positioning Sprint Filter has built since 1952, in racing first and on the road as a consequence: filtration technology proven where performance cannot be simulated.
