Upgrade Question: How to Spend $1000

[Brant]

I'm not a tech....I'd drown myself trying to change the oil

(just kidding)....

Anyways, lets say I had $1000 to sneak out of the bank account and make my stock 1995 Cobra faster.

I consider this car, with 3.08's I believe, to be slow in terms of quickness......really, a modern mini-van can take me off the line unless I go Wide Open Throttle and rev it up to 4000. I assumed
Gears would be the first thing.

3.55's or 3.73's......I figure $250+ for the gears and $500+ for installation. Supposedly a local place here in CT (Mustangs Unlimited) has a "kit" I can buy.....does SVT sell this kit?

But...what about after that.......I'd love to lower the car a bit, the 95 "offroad lift look" is definately noticable to me...especially since my car is white and I see all that black between the wheel well and the tire.......what are the "springs of chioce" these days, and what will it cost me to buy them and have them installed? Do I need to buy other parts to go along with this upgrade?

Finally...Exhaust....Headers...etc.....do I need them? What will they cost me, installed. As you can tell I'm kinda a newbie who's read alot of contradicting information online...so I'd love some advice here...(to add to the contradicting information!)

Also..I'm not a racer..this is my summer daily driver....but there's a local GT owner who's car is just beautifully tricked out...he'll punch the throttle taking a turn onto a street and the back-end will break away and squealing tires and..err..ok, so call it fanboy admiration...but in my CObra if I did that while in first gear all I'd get is....a car starting to go faster. Damn the 3.08's!

Gears First...then what? And what am I buying in terms of horsepower..oh, and problems? Will any of this stuff destroy my gas mileage? On a really good week my car will go 220 miles before I really need to fill up. I've never run it down to empty since the car's gas guage is so "vague"...suddenly I'm at 1/2 a tank...suddenly at 1/4, etc.......

PS: What RPM's will I be turning at 70mph on the highway wiht 3.55 or 3.73 gears. With the 3.08's I'm doing about 70 at 2000rpm....

Sorry for the 20 questions, but thanks for taking the time to read...if you've got any suggestions or advice, I'd apprecaite it.
You can probably gather that I don't have alot of spare cash to spend, but I do have a little..and would like to improve the performance of the car...its like it just needs some waking up.

Please see my other post regarding a heating problem I'm having.....hopefully that won't eat up my mod budget trying to fix that issue.

Thanks everyone for the read.