Renault 17 Gordini on a Coca-Cola Crown Cap: A Window into Japan's Supercar Boom
What This Item Is
This is a metal crown cap — the kind that once sealed a glass bottle of Coca-Cola — with a colorful illustration of the Renault 17 Gordini printed on the inside face. Alongside the image, Japanese text identifies the car and notes its country of origin: France. The cap was distributed through Coca-Cola Japan as part of a consumer promotion, likely in the late 1970s, where buyers collected caps the same way they might collect trading cards — one bottle at a time.
It belongs to what collectors now recognize as the Supercar Series of Coca-Cola crown caps, a Japanese promotional line that featured European high-performance automobiles. The word “supercar” carried a specific meaning in Japan at the time, referring broadly to exotic and sporty European cars that had captured the imagination of an entire generation of young people.
The Supercar Boom and the Car on the Cap
From roughly 1975 to 1978, Japan experienced a cultural phenomenon now called the Supercar Boom. European coverage of events like the Paris Motor Show filtered through to Japanese media, and the 1975–1977 manga Circuit no Okami (by Satoshi Ikezawa) turned cars like the Ferrari and Lamborghini into objects of near-mythological fascination for Japanese children and teenagers. Manufacturers responded: Calbee, Meiji Seika, Coca-Cola, and others produced cards, model kits, and crown caps featuring these cars.
The Renault 17 was a two-door sports coupe built by Renault in France between 1971 and 1979. The Gordini designation marked its performance variant, fitted with a tuned 1565cc engine and a more aggressive exterior. The Gordini name traces to Amédée Gordini (1899–1979), an Italian-born French racing car constructor who partnered closely with Renault from the late 1960s onward; from 1968, the Gordini badge became Renault’s in-house signal for sport-tuned models. The Renault 17 Gordini was sold primarily in France and European markets, with very limited official presence in Japan — which makes its appearance on a mass-market Japanese promotional item genuinely noteworthy.
Why This Cap Interests Collectors Today
Crown cap collecting was a distinct hobby in Japan from the 1960s through the 1980s. Unlike gashapon or food toys, bottle caps arrived passively — a byproduct of buying a drink — which gave the hobby an everyday, democratic quality. Coca-Cola and other foreign brands leaned into this by printing serialized illustrated series on the inner face, turning each purchase into a small discovery. Today these caps are reassessed as Showa-era retro collectibles, artifacts of a specific moment in Japanese consumer culture.
For collectors, this particular cap sits at the intersection of two distinct interests: Coca-Cola memorabilia and European automotive history. It was made in Japan, carries Japanese text, and yet depicts a French car that was barely sold there — a small, tangible record of how European automobile culture was received and popularized in Japan during the 1970s. The fact that a Gordini-badged Renault, rather than a Ferrari or Porsche, was selected for inclusion suggests the series cast a wide net across European performance cars, and that detail alone gives this cap a certain specificity that distinguishes it within the broader Supercar Series.
Price: $18.49 | View on eBay
