FARNHAM sportscar racing team Hawthorns Motorsport will decide at the end of this month whether or not to graduate from club-level racing to Britain's top-level GT championship.

Hawthorns have run for several years in the one-make TVR Tuscan Challenge series, but team boss Rod Barrett wants his team to step up to the British GT Championship.

The squad have put a deposit down on a pair of TVR's brand-new T350C models and hope to run them in the newly-formed entry-level GT Cup class of the GT Championship.

But the team have been forced to wait until the end of January before confirming the move because TVR is still carrying out tests at its Blackpool base to ascertain whether the T350C can be converted into a race car in time for the start of the season.

If the tests prove that more time is needed to make sufficient safety and performance upgrades to the cars, Hawthorns will return to the Tuscan Challenge for one last year, with a view to making the step up to GTs in 2004.

Barrett said: "Whatever happens, we will definitely have to decide by February 1 what we are doing because otherwise we won't have enough time to organise anything for the 2003 season.

"We want to make the move into GTs, but it may not be possible this year if TVR cannot confirm that the cars will be ready by the beginning of March, which would be a shame. Either way, we will step up this year or next."

If Hawthorns gets the go-ahead to run the T350Cs, which were unveiled to the world at last November's Birmingham International Motor Show at the NEC, the current quartet of Tuscan Challenge drivers – Barrett, Jan Persson, Steve Moore and 2002 Challenge runner-up Jay Shepherd – would drive the cars in the two-driver endurance GT series. The cars would be engineered by veteran sportscar outfit Colin Blower Motorsport.

A previous plan to run a hard-top version of the Tuscan has now fallen by the wayside thanks to the T350C plan.

Barrett is also looking for alternative GT drives for Shepherd, who is viewed as a potential sportscar star, having pushed eventual Tuscan champion Steve Guglielmi to the wire in last year's championship.

Barrett also hinted that, if Hawthorns does head back to the Tuscan Challenge, which is part of the British GT Championship's regular support package, series organisers would be pressured to make some changes.

He said: "There are several issues which need looking at with the Challenge. The main one is that we used to have dedicated test days before each round and a guaranteed double-header at each round. But now we get a short practice session on the Saturday morning of a race meeting and perhaps two races. There isn't enough practice time for inexperienced drivers to get used to the cars and we don't want to crash with them."

The TVR Tuscan Challenge and British GT Championship start at Donington Park on April 5/6.