[imagesource: Steve Winter / Kenny Fried]

Last season’s Formula One finale was a race for the ages.

Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen battled to the very end, with the latter securing the title on the final lap in the most controversial of circumstances.

Remove the drivers from behind the wheels of their cars and things are slightly less dramatic. That being said, the technology on display during Friday’s Indy Autonomous Challenge at the annual CES technology conference was quite something.

Mashable reports:

The autonomous race car competition came to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway with five teams from seven universities racing self-driving cars for the first place title and $150,000.

Team PoliMOVE from Politecnico di Milano in Italy and the University of Alabama beat out Team TUM Autonomous Motorsport from the Technische Universität München in Germany in the final head-to-head race.

The race was close with Team TUM spinning out at the end. But TUM couldn’t catch up from behind nor keep up with PoliMOVE’s record speed of 173 mph.

That’s a top speed of around 278km/h and nobody at the wheel.

As far as final laps go the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix can’t be topped, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t impressive:

All the teams compete with the same Dallara AV-21 race car. This video helps to better understand the technology at work:

[source:mashable]