"My life has sped up. As funny as that sounds, it has sped up. The business world is very hectic and demanding and I love every moment of it. When I go back to racing it will be like going on vacation," said De Vellis, who works with Electronic Arts (EA) helping design their Need for Speed video game series for computers and game consoles.
When he's not working "20 hours a day" at EA's Burnaby studio, De Vellis can be found at Dolce 67, his Italian cafe located in the 3700-block of East Hastings. The cafe, which offers gourmet coffee, various flavours of gelato, panini and other Italian delicacies, is decked out in a racing theme -like checkered flag designs, racing tires, auto mechanic tool drawers for storage and racing photos on the walls.
Both ventures seem worlds away from his former career, now on hold, racing in the Formula Atlantic series. But there's a lot of crossover, which is what De Vellis, 24, intended. At EA his job is to put the feel and spirit of individual cars into the Need for Speed games.
"It's my job to create engine packages, transmissions, shock dampers - pretty much simulate exactly in real life through the computer," he explained.
"Let's take a Mitsubishi Eclipse or a [Mazda] RX-7. We take that real car, in real life and put it in our game. It's modelled to the T, it's identical. Anything the car has, we can model it, we can tune it. It gives the game player that ultimate control, it makes it so realistic that when they're sliding that car, it feels like that car has weight."
His two-year-old cafe is also a constant reminder of his racing career and he also has a few well-heeled customers who occasionally tap into his experience.
"People come to the cafe when they get their [new] Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsche 911s, you name it. People will come in and say, 'Hey Marc, do you have five minutes. Can you show me what this thing can do.' "
And De Vellis finds it difficult to turn them down. Expensive performance cars are much like race cars. You can't treat them like an Oldsmobile Cutlass or Honda Civic SI. There are specific ways to let out the clutch, brake before a corner or shift gears.
When he does take these cars for a ride with their owners, he doesn't emulate the way gamers drive while playing the Need for Speed games. "We don't go racing but I just show them what their car can do," he said.
One of the things he loves about racing is the "rush."
"Very few people have experienced a true adrenaline rush. A true adrenaline rush is when your heart races, you start to sweat and you almost throw up. Then it goes away right away and you calm down. When you calm down, you start to absorb everything," explained De Vellis.
"When you do well, you're at the highest of the highs."
He's still looking to get back into racing but knows the money is tight and sponsors are few.
I've always said that if a decent ride comes my way I'll throw a lot of my own money into it."
For more information on Marc De Vellis and his cafe, go online to www.marcdevellis.com.
mario bartel/newsleader