[5.0 Fiend]

Yeah I,d say gears are going to give you the biggest difference. The first stang I drove was a stocker with 2.73 gearing, and it felt like it dropped off in 5th gear. When I bought my 84, it had 3.73's, and to say the least, it will get up and go a lot quicker and pull harder, but your going to loose some fuel mileage, probably better off with 3.55's. Like the others said, look into a good intake and exhaust,some underdrive pulleys, maybe some nice roller rockers for the valve train, to pull out some hidden ponies. Another thing that might work would be one of those power programmers. I have never used one myself, but I watch horsepower tv and trucks on spike tv all the time, and you would be amazed at how much hp and torque you can pull out of an efi motor just by changing the ignition and fuel mapping, all you have to do is plug it into your cars computer and answer a couple of yes/no questions and that's it. As for beating camaros, it depends on how fast you wanna spend. For example, you could look into better flowing heads, ($1200 pr), new cam ($250), or maybe even a blower (supercharger $2500).I think the most important thing to look into though is the suspension/handling. Again this can get quite expensive, but a 200 hp car can beat an 800 hp car if it is set up right. You'll probably just want to stick with some easy less expensive mods for now, and I'm sure you'll be happy with the difference.