Racing cars started off as a hobby, but . . . It’s more than a hobby now.

Derek Scallet’s office at Sail America seems to belie the fact that he is the group’s director of finance and administration. With the exception of an adding machine, a computer and a framed certificate of completion in public accounting, the room is more like a shrine to the sport of race car driving. The walls are covered with color photos of Scallet in race cars. The chairs resemble bucket seats. Particularly eye-catching is the crumpled door of a Toyota MR2 hanging on the wall beside Scallet’s desk; it’s a souvenir of when Scallet hit a wall at 100 m.p.h., was knocked unconscious and broke a couple of ribs. A photo of a scene from the movie “Le Mans” hangs below the mangled door. But Scallet, 33, says that despite people’s assumptions to the contrary, accounting and race car driving do mix. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed him in his office at Sail America and staff photographer Barbara Martin photographed him.

At one time I wanted to be an architect, but somewhere along the line I became more practical and decided that finance made more sense for me. I studied accounting in school and I worked for a CPA firm from there. It’s been a career made up of a lot of short-term jobs, a year, two years.

Racing cars started off as a hobby, but it occupies a great deal of my time outside of work. It’s more than a hobby now. It’s becoming more so as I’m starting to get to drive more for professional and semi-professional teams.

They are both obviously a part of who I am. I guess they fill different needs in me. Probably the racing is closer to who I’d like to be.

My career as a driver is still fairly young. I’ve been driving for about five years now. This year was a pretty big season for me. I got a chance to drive with some fairly well-known drivers.

I started in high-performance cars, which are tiny little things. It’s like lying on the ground. They can do maybe 100 m.p.h. I did that for about a season and became very good friends with somebody who was a very good engine builder and we put together a team and just ran in some club races for a couple of years. From that, we met another group that was forming a team with Toyota Racing, which is part of Toyota Motors, and they asked me to co-drive. That’s essentially what I’ve been doing.

People do lose their lives doing this. Obviously the rewards of self-fulfillment are worth the risks. But they are calculated risks. Because you don’t think about whether you’re going to get hurt or not.

You really don’t notice the speed at all. Usually your focus is fairly long down the track. You lose that sensation of speed and you’re more concentrating on the next move that you want to make and setting up the car. On occasion you pass close to a wall and you get some feeling for it. It’s part of the fun.

On some corners of some tracks, especially oval-type tracks, you come out of the corner and, to maximize your speed, you want to bring it right up as close to the wall as possible. It just helps because what you’re trying to do is draw this nice, long arc. You’re trying to let the car work as little as possible, and you’re trying to find that nice balance.

I liken it a lot to dance. For somebody who is familiar with dance, there’s a time when you just get a good rhythm and you can sort of enjoy the power and the grace all at the same time. This seems a lot like that.

The fun thing about racing is traveling around the country, getting to see a lot of different people and places. There is also a bit of a fraternity within racing which is a lot of enjoyment because when you are traveling, you develop some camaraderie, even with the people you compete against.

I find what works best for me is to try to have . . . well, relaxed concentration is what’s generally thought to be the best mental framework to be in. I try to get very relaxed just before the race. You want to keep your body relaxed and mentally alert at the same time. That’s the goal I’m trying to achieve.

A lot of what interests me is in the realm of art, craftsmanship, and I guess I see this all blended together. Racing is probably at many times the blending of the best of man and the best of machine as far as technology goes and as far as skills go.