Careers, like lives, hinge on the smallest moments and decisions.

For Mark Webber, a 36-year-old driver at the Red Bull team, while the season may still offer him a chance to win the title — there are six races left, and he is in fifth place in the series, 62 points behind the leader, Fernando Alonso of Spain — it was in 2010 that the Australian appeared to have had his best chance to take the title. Maybe a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Going into the last race of that season, in Abu Dhabi, four drivers had a mathematical chance to win the title, with Webber in second place in the standings. He had led the series for most of the second half of the season until he suddenly slipped behind Ferrari’s Alonso.

Still, his chances looked much better than those of Lewis Hamilton, the McLaren driver who was sitting fourth in the series, or of Sebastian Vettel, Webber’s teammate at Red Bull, where he had long been a protégé of the Austrian energy drink company’s young driver program. Webber, 11 years older than Vettel and therefore less interesting as a marketing tool for Red Bull, had seemed to be a second thought for the team.

So heavily did the dice seemed to be fixed in Vettel’s favor within the team that after Webber won the British Grand Prix that year, he said cynically to his team, “Not bad for a No. 2 driver.”