Ferrari 308 GTB, Coca-Cola Caps, and Japan’s Supercar Boom

Ferrari 308 GTB Supercar Crown Cap by Coca-Cola Japan

A Bottle Cap Built to Be Collected

This item is a vintage metal crown cap — the crimped, standard-diameter cap that once sealed a glass Coca-Cola bottle in Japan — printed with an illustration of the Ferrari 308 GTB. The car’s profile sits at the center, flanked by Japanese text reading “Italy” at the top and “Ferrari 308 GTB” beneath the image. The piece is numbered #2, confirming it as one entry in a planned series: several different exotic cars, each assigned a number, each cap designed to encourage collectors to hunt down the rest. Visible rust and surface wear place this firmly in its era; those marks of aging are precisely what distinguish an original piece from any reproduction. Whether this series was produced under an official Ferrari license is not confirmed by available records, though the brand name and illustration appear prominently throughout.

Japan’s Supercar Boom and the Bottle Cap That Captured It

In the mid-to-late 1970s, Japan was gripped by a cultural phenomenon still remembered as the “Supercar Boom.” Much of the credit for igniting it belongs to Circuit no Okami (Circuit Wolf), a manga serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1975 to 1979, which filled a generation of schoolchildren with vivid images of European exotic cars — Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches. Supercar exhibitions drew enormous, media-covered crowds of children across the country, and manufacturers moved quickly to supply themed merchandise: cards, erasers, plastic models, and, in the case of Coca-Cola Japan, themed crown caps.

Japanese children had long collected bottle caps as a pastime — domestic soft-drink and beer bottles generated a steady supply, and series with consistent themes made them more compelling. Coca-Cola Japan channeled this habit into a deliberate promotional strategy, issuing numbered, themed sequences of caps that turned every bottle purchase into a chance to complete a set. A Supercar series was a natural fit for the moment. The exact release date of this particular series cannot be confirmed, but the context places it in the late 1970s to early 1980s, squarely within the peak years of the boom.

The Ferrari 308 GTB and Its Place in the Series

The Ferrari 308 GTB made its public debut at the 1975 Paris Motor Show — the same year Circuit no Okami launched in Japan. Designed by Pininfarina, it is a mid-engine, two-seat coupe powered by a 3.0-liter V8, with the “308” designation reflecting both the displacement and the cylinder count. “GTB” stands for Gran Turismo Berlinetta, denoting the closed-roof coupe form. Production ran from 1975 to 1985. A Targa-roofed variant, the 308 GTS, followed in 1977 and later appeared in the American television series Magnum, P.I., widening the car’s international profile through the 1980s.

The cap depicts the 308 GTB in blue — a detail worth noting, since Rosso Corsa red is the color most strongly associated with Ferrari. Blue Ferraris do exist, but the choice is less conventional and gives this particular cap a distinct character within any complete series. Among Ferrari enthusiasts, the 308 is regarded as one of the brand’s most elegantly proportioned models and one of the more recognizable Ferraris from that era. For collectors, this small metal disc sits at the intersection of two of the world’s most recognizable brands — Ferrari and Coca-Cola — refracted through the specific lens of Japan’s Showa-era collectible culture, where the impulse to complete a numbered set was as powerful as the cars themselves.