If you cannot get into a good place, you can always try to kill the rivals. You may want to keep track of the top 5 rivals and not just focus on the one with the "rival" label, that way you don't lose time trying to track where in the track he is.

Yeah kill your rivals is the best tip for an easy victory. 

If you like to invest some time in the game I can really recommend to learn how to drift/slide. I'd say play Devil's Forest 3 with Blood Hawk at 100% acceleration settings and try to drift around all the corners. If have you unlocked the staff ghost keep trying until you can beat it. The same goes for Silence 2 and Port Town. If you can beat those 3 staff ghosts comfortably with drifting (don't worry about doing any dives it's not needed for Master) I'd say you can do it well enough to use it in the master tournament. The AI will match your acceleration settings but in Master but they don't drift so once you can do this you'll have a huge advantage + it's a ton of fun, hands down most important skill to learn for F-Zero X. Oh and use side attacks to help you keep your grip around corners you aren't comfortable with sliding.

Another thing that can help is seizing an opportunity to move up the pack by gaining speed through boosting or airtime. Some times in one swift move you can jump from rear to front. But if you hit another ship from behind you'll lose your speed and energy too, so it's make or break. You need a bit of luck.

It's possible to beat master without sliding or double tap. You can cut into sharp corners with the shoulder button* and overtake other racers. I remember a track like the hand-shaped one being easier for me to finish first on, because of lots of sharp turns.

More recently I started to get the hang of sliding and it's a fun and satisfying technique to master, especially boost-sliding. Took me a while though. I like Red Canyon for practising

Good players are able to use double tap very effectively to go through bends at high speeds and not slide out and incur speed loss. Watching how they tackle tracks on youtube can help you improve too.

* left with Z or right with R. Confusingly, the manual calls this "sliding".

https://www.flickr.com/photos/thecuster58/5498812982/in/album-72157626198701584/

 Well, thank you guys. Killing rivals is something I never tried to do as is a big pain in the butt, but seems that I gotta learn.

And much appreciated the sliding tip. Geez, I never thought it was that hard to learn.

 i noticed you're playing on WiiU. that on itself adds more difficulty since it has input lag and the stick controls are too sensitive.