The only thing I'm subscribing to is the fact that you can make numbers out to be whatever you want them to be.
It took damn near a
quarter pound of dirt to end the test for the K&N (our topic subject, remember, and a filter
bashed by SPICER pre-test, fwiw) and 0.22 cubic inch of the stuff got through the filter. That's
smaller than a sugar cube!
I don't think that the sum of the dirt that found its way to the airbox in my Legacy and that in my SVX (combined, over 80k miles) has met a quarter pound. That would work its way out to a gram a year if SPICER's test's figures hold true.
In a four-oil-change year, that's a quarter gram. That's probably the size of a sesame seed. That's smaller than this emoticon:
I'm not going to tell you which filter is best for you, or which one is worst, and I'm not defending the K&N because it's in my car. I'm telling you that the numbers in the test are hype at best.
Numbers are numbers. What they mean is up to their appropriate interpretation.
I suppose you could decide that whether you eat a regular hamburger or a Big 'n' Tasty before you hit the dragstrip might critically influence your ET. After all, the Big 'n' Tasty is bigger, right?