I had the driver seat changed to a single-piece bucket. The good thing about it is that it's so much easier to pick up information from the car. The bad thing about it is that for men in their 30s and up, it can get quite painful not having access to a restroom. A tricky thing about it is that there aren't many seats that fit nicely. I chose one whose edge outside the shoulder would touch the door panel. As the seat is moved forward, the clearance between the seat and the door narrows. Since many of the aftermarket seats tend to come with rails that may raise the seat position higher than the stock seat, I had mine welded onto the original rails. This one is clearly about half and inch lower.
I was thinking of getting an aluminum radiator but instead changed the hood. The hood was designed to let air out and not in, so I was curious about how the water temp would be affected. It made a difference. But at the time the front bumper was still unchanged. In order to let more air in, upon suggestion from the shop, I cut 3 vertical plastic bars that came between the bumper and radiator. They're thin and do not seem to block air. But removing them would enable pushing down the center part of the 'gaping mouth' to prevent air from being deflected upwards but rather more everywhere.
The shop had 2 campaigns every year when one can have the compression checked, for free. I've been doing it as often as possible. Some folks I know avoided it because they didn't want to know how much they had damaged the engine since the time before and how near they were to the next rebuild. Hopefully, my engine's compression has not decreased dramatically but rather fairly gradually. The only significant drop discovered was when I initially had it measured, before installing the boost pressure gauge. It's probable that I inadvertently(?) caused one of the limiters to kick in at a bad time.
They say brand-new rotaries are shipped with compression rates of around 9.6 front and rear. Rates below 7.5 may be too painful to keep up with traffic at low rpms. As of the time of this writing, 9/21/02, I imagine mine to be about 9.2 front and about 8.9 rear. The difference is not great, but I think the original cause may have been due to fuel being cut in the rear housing and stepping on it too enthusiastically before completing the run-in. Compression can be measured using a quasi-digital compression checker that I saw on Mazdatrix's.