Remington was born in Santa Monica, California, and studied pre-engineering at Santa Monica Junior College. He worked initially as a component inspector at Northrop Aircraft. When World War II began he enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces by concealing his age — he was underage — and memorizing the vision charts to pass color-blindness screening. He served as a flight engineer on B-24 Liberators, accumulating practical mechanical experience under operational conditions.
After the war, Remington built race cars for friends and developed hydroplane components and engine swap kits as informal projects. In the late 1950s he became chief engineer to Lance Reventlow, overseeing construction of the Scarab sports racing car at a workshop on Princeton Drive in what is now Marina del Rey, California. The Scarab represented an ambitious American challenge to European constructors and demonstrated Remington's ability to execute complex builds from scratch.
When Reventlow shuttered his operation, Carroll Shelby hired Remington as chief engineer at his new shop on the same street. The partnership proved decisive. Shelby American became the dominant force in American sports car racing through the early 1960s, and Shelby publicly acknowledged that Remington's engineering was the foundation of that success. Remington's work on the Shelby Cobra and the Ford GT40 program — which culminated in Ford's historic 1-2-3 finish at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans — established him as a figure of the first rank in motorsport engineering. When Shelby American was later divided, Remington remained with Shelby Racing Components in Torrance, California.
In 1968 Remington moved to North Carolina to run the Talladega Grand National stock car program at Holman and Moody, one of NASCAR's most powerful preparation operations. The team won the Daytona 500 that year, extending Remington's record across yet another discipline.
Returning to California, Remington joined Dan Gurney's All American Racers (AAR), where he would remain for the bulk of his later career. At AAR he worked across an exceptionally wide range of programs: Can-Am, Formula 1, Formula 5000, Indianapolis 500, Trans-Am, GTP, and IMSA endurance racing. He also contributed to Alligator Motorcycles and took on aerospace contract work in parallel. In 2012, near the end of his full-time career, he engineered the oil and water cooling systems and the suspension on the DeltaWing, the radical low-drag experimental racer entered at Le Mans that year. Health issues led him to step back from full-time work at AAR in 2012.
Remington was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2019, six years after his death. He is portrayed by actor Ray McKinnon in the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari, which dramatizes the Ford–Ferrari rivalry at the 1966 Le Mans race — the campaign in which Remington's engineering helped deliver one of American motorsport's defining victories.
His career arc — from wartime flight engineer to Scarab builder, Cobra architect, NASCAR winner, and late-career innovator on an experimental Le Mans prototype — represents a breadth and duration rarely matched in the history of the sport. That Carroll Shelby, one of the most competitive personalities in racing, identified Remington as the reason for his success is perhaps the most succinct measure of his standing.