How can I improve this Cobra?

[Steve Cassani]

Here are two sentences, taken out of context from your initial post:

"I have a 1995 ERA."

"I've owned it for one year."

You have a car that was completed in terms the original owner saw fit his idea of how a replica should work. Perhaps what drives your interest in making the car better is less a dissatisfaction to be remedied by mechanical change and more a matter of putting your signature on the car. The difficulty you face arises from a heartfelt desire to feel something you've done makes a difference, yet anything you might do results in a barely indiscernable shift in control when you take on a challenging corner you already know well or the change manifests a nuanced tone when you hit the throttle just so. Your passenger will not hear the difference you hear. He does not know the car. So until you are no longer a passenger in a car someone else built, the need to acknowledge yourself as an author contributing late to an already well-written tale will demand satisfaction.

Another poster suggests taking time to immerse yourself in the car, its history, its mechanics. This is sound advice, better I think than jumping whole heartedly into costly changes that likley will leave you wondering whether they reveal something you knew could be better each time you drove the familiar corner. Put the car on jack stands. Quiet the lights in the garage. Then, shop light in hand, creep from corner to corner, front to rear, side to side. See the mechanics as the builder saw them and I mean here not the original owner. I am inviting you to see the car as the builder at ERA saw it come together. Why is this piece here? What does it do? Why this fastener and not a lock nut? How does this assembly differ from that of the cars that created the history your car commemorates? Is the connection over time weak or clear?

Pursued in detail you will come to own the car in your own right. Then you will be able to articulate changes that speak better to the past, because that is the aspect you wish the car to present. You may find you want the car to better advantage you of technologies Bob Negstad could not have known fifty years ago. Surely he would have applied them had he been working today. Take another year to work your way through this sort of problem and you will be in a position to decide the ride you want. The third year will be more fun than you've known and as you've told us, it's already darn good.