I swear I had a Japanese version (Super Famicom) with better hover cars back in the day although my memory is shaky about it.

Are you thinking of the more detailed vehicles from BS F-Zero Grand Prix 2 perhaps? If so, they can be added to F-Zero with a ROM hack. As explained here, you can also apply a MSU-1 patch on top of that for CD quality music in any emulator that supports it (i.e. ares/bsnes/Mesen/Snes9x).