He always messed with engines. He also built his first tube frame car with a 2 1/2 HP Briggs & Stratton engine with money from his paper route. He started street racing around 1960 with a '55 Pontiac then switched to a Chevy Impala and then to Corvettes, around 1964. He switched over to Corvettes fairly early, when I bought a silver 1964. I was about 18 or 20 at that time. I was one of the first to fit one of the early 427s. It took some modifications to the frame rail but the cars were lighter and the suspension was better. It was obvious that the car was a better platform. He kept building them and racing them. He would tune his cars up every single night and go out and race about 150 miles. He started putting bored and stroked 409s and NASCAR big blocks in his car. He kept building engines and changing them. He would sell the last one to build a new one. And there were always tow trucks in the driveway bringing my cars home. He bought a 1968 Corvette (435 HP) and the first night he put an L-88 into it. He won the first autocross he entered. He went back the next week and did the same. He went to the local road racing track (Waterford Hills) to take the driver's school. Frank Cipelli who first took him around the track and gave him instruction on road racing; He helped him a lot in his career. The guys instructing me did things differently than he was used to and he seemed to go backwards. He went through two sets of tires one weekend just trying to keep up. He formed his engine building company, Auto Research Engineering (ARE) and with some good engine work his ideas on suspension tuning, he came back the next year (1969) and started setting records. He did a lot of racing that year. He got my regional license and national license in the same year. In the next two years, He won the SCCA A-Production National Championships back-to-back. You know that a lot of the equation was the big engines. We always used the basic big block engines and almost always the all-aluminum ones to save weight. It also goes without saying that through all of this I had full support from my brother Burt and I also had a good back-up driver in Jim Greendyke. We had a lot of breakage in 1970 but we pulled out enough wins to beat out the Owens Corning team at the Atlanta National Championship event. In 1971 I also had Dick Smothers as a co-driver at the longer events. That was a lot of fun. When he made the move for IMSA, he was backed by BF Goodrich, the tire manufacturer for which he wore radial street tires. But this strategy did not prove successful as he did not win any race. A 4th in Mid Ohio in 1972 was the best he could do. He began the 1973 season with a 3rd at Sebring and 7th at Daytona. He had to run flat out during the race to compensate the fact that they ran on radial street tires. In 1974, exit BF Goodrich as he started building more radical Corvettes with altered bodyworks. IMSA had recently homologated a "widebody" version of nose, tail and doors for the Corvette and Greenwood recognized the potential. In 1974 Greenwood developed this Corvette utilizing the new "widebody" parts, a coil-over suspension system designed by Bob Riley and chassis designed by Ron Fournier. His car proved fast if not reliable, and Milt Minter won the Talladega round but the Porsche Carreras won the Championship. However, he successfully ended the season in dominating the Daytona Finale : he won the race with a 33s margin over Al Holbert and set a new GT record. For this event, he had a brand new car that was even more radical and he has been clocked at speeds over 210mph, well over the GT standards. His car was fitted with a V8 8,0L engine which could produce more than 700hp which was no match for the opposition! For the 1975 season, he fielded this car fitted with a 7,0L engine supposed to be more reliable. Daytona and Sebring resulted in dnfs as the car experienced reliability problems. His talents were multiple and he also did the promotion for the next event, the hood of his car sporting a promotional ad for the "12 Hours of Sebring"and later for the "6 Hours of Riverside". His car, dubbed as the "Batmobile" for the fans, was always a crowd's favorite. But he earned poor results with a sole victory, again at the Daytona Finale with the new 1976 car. Meanwhile, he won the Trans Am Championship with a less radical car, the Braun roadster, beating a bunch of semi-pro drivers. Some of them were John Greenwood's customers as he had begun to be successful and he built cars for Roger Kraus, Phil Currin and others. In 1976, Mike Brockman ran an identical car (#69)with some good results (three 4th at Atlanta, Mid Ohio and Laguna Seca). In 1977, a new car was built and raced at a few races but the car again proved even more unreliable. At that time, John began to develop tubeframe cars for John Paul and Greg Pickett , the latter winning the Trans Am Championship. John was not to be seen on the track before 1982, and it was with a GTO Corvette entered by T and R Racing, with some success, but it was not for the overall. For 1983, a change of rules did not help John going any further with this tentative, so he cancelled his projects and concentrated more on his business. Today, he is still known as the Corvette man and his name is recognized everywhere in the world for hi-performance cars. He remains one of the IMSA legends. John Greenwood, known in racing circles as 'Mr. Corvette," had been racing Corvettes since 1970 and knew what it took to make the Corvette a competitive race winner.

John Greenwood has become Mr Corvette with his high performance racers. Mike Brockman drove one of the first widebodies customer car.