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  1. I won a contest, probably the biggest thing to happen to me in my life.

When I read this sentence, I don't know if it comes from:

  1. I won a contest, probably the biggest thing [that will happen to me in my life].
  2. I won a contest, probably the biggest thing [that has happened to me in my life].

Or the first sentence means another thing.

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    A "careful" speaker would be far more likely to say I won a contest, which was probably the biggest thing to happen to me in my life. That way, the "nouniness" of the initial clause and the temporal scope of the secondary clause are more obvious. But only extreme pedants would think your version was in any way "incorrect". As to the implication that speaker is referring to his entire life (including his as-yet-unlived future) - the text is effectively ambiguous (it's just incredibly unlikely that he's making a "prediction", pragmatically speaking).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Oct 27, 2022 at 15:41

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In this context, the meaning is closer to, "*the biggest thing that has happened to me in my life, but only because we know it happened in the past. There's nothing in the grammar that suggests it's in the past. We could use the exact same grammar to describe the future:

We're having a baby, probably the biggest thing to happen to me in my life.

And to answer the question in the title, this form is called "infinitive relative clause", so it's not substituting an infinitive for a clause -- the infinitive is considered a relative clause itself.

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