A racecar with nobody at the wheel snaked around another to snatch the lead on an oval track at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Friday in a first-of-its-kind high-speed match between self-driving vehicles.

Members of Italian-American team PoliMOVE cheered as their Formula 1-style racecar, nicknamed 'Minerva,' repeatedly passed a rival entered by South Korean team Kaist.

Minerva was doing nearly 115 miles per hour when it blew past the Kaist car, easily beating the top speed hoped for by race organizers and winning the $150,000 top prize.

But every racer was deemed a winner by organizers who saw the real victory as the fact that self-driving algorithms could handle the high-speed competition.

'It's a success,' Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) co-organizer Paul Mitchell said to AFP before the checkered flag was waved.

The race pitted teams of students from around the world against one another to rev up the capabilities of self-driving cars, improving the technology for use anywhere.

In October, the IAC put the brakes on self-driving F1 cars racing together to allow more time to ready technology for the challenge, opting instead to let them do laps individually to see which had the best time.

'This almost holds the world record for speed of an autonomous car,' PoliMOVE engineer Davide Rigamonti boasted as he gazed lovingly at the white-and-black beauty.

The single seat usually reserved for a driver was during this race instead packed with electronics.