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TL;DR: I recommend trying a year of trackdays first, and committing to racing in year 2.
First things first on the bike. Do not expect to ride your race prepped bike on the street, unless your local police are lax on rules enforcement. If your bike is prepped for racing (fiberglass bodywork, no kickstand, all lights removed, license plate assembly removed, etc), you will be spending a lot of time trying to swap back and forth. If you are dead set on going racing, you will need to read your local race organization's rule book to see exactly what kind of preparation they require. Some are fairly lax and some are more strict.
In the old days, the only way to ride a motorcycle on the track was to go racing. That meant you were immediately tossed in the deep end. However, almost all tracks have trackdays (basically practice days) separated by overall pace of the riders. Trackdays allow you to get up to a decent pace in a safer, more controlled environment. Passing at trackdays has an extra margin of error compared to racing.
If you do not have any idea of what your pace will be like, trying to jump into racing will be quite a shock as you may find yourself significantly off-pace and getting passed and lapped in less than ideal situations. Personally, my target in racing is to stay on the lead lap.
As the others have said, you should look at the categories of bikes for your local racing organization. If everyone else is on a modern bike, you are really setting yourself up to have a difficult time on the ZX7R. There are now a number of 300cc and mid 2000s 600cc track bikes for the budget racer to look at, and they will be significantly closer to the sharp end of things for their respective categories.
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