At some point last week, on or around May 28th, the derbywheel.com website was replaced by an error message from its hosting provider Wix, declaring: ‘Looks like this domain isn’t connected to a website yet.’

The Global Keirin editorial staff wasn’t immediately concerned: maybe it was even a good sign. Switching over to a new website can sometimes mean a brief moment of downtime, as details of the new site and its location spread across the internet.

Or it could be a simple administrative oversight. Automated renewals can fail for all sorts of reasons, such as an expired credit card number. Not even Google and Microsoft are entirely immune to forgotten online renewals.

But several days later, the same error message is still being displayed; and Global Keirin has not received any hints of a major new announcement being imminent.

Even at our most optimistic, we can’t interpret this as a good sign.

The only logical conclusions are that the company’s Wix hosting account has expired, and nobody has noticed… or the account has been knowingly allowed to expire.

Global Keirin‘s continuous tracking shows that the website had not been edited in over three months; and it was over two years since the last update was posted in its News section – although the website had carried various communications since then, including the pledge last year that ‘DerbyWheel will be implemented‘.

The derbywheel.com domain name, last updated in November 2025, is not due to expire until December 2027.

The separate DerbyWheelPlayer.com website, which also uses Wix for its hosting, remains active – although it still declares ‘First DerbyWheel season begins 2025’, so the word ‘active’ is carrying a lot of weight there.

If this is the end of the DerbyWheel dream, it’s ironic that it should come barely a week before the start of Japan’s Keirin World Series, with six lucky international stars being invited to participate in mid-ranking Japanese domestic competition.