I pay for track insurance through rlicorp at every event.
I'm not too worried about myself crashing but more of someone hitting me.
There are plenty of threads on various forums where people take their daily out on the track, crash it and are stuck with a bill for what's left on the car loan...
I'm in the San Mateo area near SF.
I race at Laguna, Thunderhill and Buttonwillow. Pm me if you wish to join or watch.
I'm going to Buttonwillow July 23rd next.
I just did some instruction yesterday and went through the same thing with my student.
He has an automatic atsv and would love to shift mid corner and then he'd freak out with the back end came out.
You should never shift mid corner if you can help it since it unloads the car and the above...
You won't miss your GT one bit. The only thing I hear is some people mentioning the loss of low end grunt on the 350.
However that is forgotten when you are hauling ass past 8k rpm!
The ds2500 is a street pad.
You can swap between the oem or ds2500 with a DSUNO or DS1.11 without any addtional bedding.
This is common for all pads typically as far as not being compatible with other brands.
If you don't care about your mag ride then you have a good amount of options.
If you do, DSC will have a coilover system which puts the oem mag ride system on steroids.