I've pretty much put the word out around hampshire for somewhere that knows anything about MR-2s. A couple of garages come to mind, particularly JDModified up in Basingstoke, however they are pretty expensive and I don't want to use them mainly because of the way they treat their staff, so the search continued.
As luck would have it, a friend of a friend introduced me to Ned at Miller's Motors in Romsey.
These guys are sort of an 'unofficial' Jap Specialist in the sense that whilst they work with all sorts of cars, it's very uncommon for them not to have some variety of Skyline or turbo'd Jap car in the back somewhere. In another blind stroke of luck it had transpired that myself and a couple of other friends had taken up a lease on the garage directly opposite Millers. Ned himself used to run a Japanese import business in the 90s and early 2000s, specialising in MR-2s.
After speaking with the man at length for a while it became pretty apparent that he really knew his onions and had offered to take a look at a long standing problem on mine. This had been in and out of a couple of 'regular' independent garages who couldn't find much wrong. However an afternoon in Ned's hands and the car was running much better than it ever has during my ownership; it wasn't so much what he did, but in the manner he did it - watching him at work was very impressive, all the measurements he seemed to know by hand and he just had a really good 'feel' for the car. All the while he was happily babbling to me about the nuances of the car and how much he enjoyed working on them. I am aware that the company isn't on this forum, nor do they have a couple of MR-2s stashed away that can be used for fault finding purposes, but unless you want to drive up north to see Peter or Pacific Works, I think they are the best we have.
I wouldn't hesitate to go there again.http://www.millers-motors.co.uk/index.html
It does state on the website that they are mobile, but they do now have a workshop which isn't far off the M271.