To be honest (and no offence to indoor clubs is intended by this at all), I tend to view indoors as a neccessary evil if you live in the UK. We're not blessed with amazing weather like California, and we don't have huge tracts of unused land either, so that means that for a lot of the year if you want to be guaranteed race action it's got to be indoors. Ultimatelly this country also doesn't have a big enough family of racers to justify the kind of indoor 'dirt nirvanas' that you see in the US - now that's offroad racing indoors! What we do in the UK on carpet, I'm not so sure it's really off road, but we do it pretty well.
As for outdoor racing - again I can see why astro is so big in the UK. I've helped out at dirt tracks (I come from 1/8th) and it's a lot of hard work and money to maintain a dirt track; you're also even more vulnerable to the elements. Astro outdoors is at least runable as long as it's not stupidly wet, it's also a lot lower maintanence. The downside? Crazy amounts of grip, which to me limits how 'off road' it really is.
Again, as long as it's racing, my buddies are there and we're having fun, it's all good. I just may spend some of the day dreaming about a nice, big, well groomed, clay track. One day when my numbers come up...
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