I think the map may have taken up too much real-estate. I kinda wish they would bring back what they did in Mario Kart 64 (unless I'm mis-remembering this), you could set it to show the relative positions of the characters going around the perimeter of the screen. Not an actual map, but at least you could tell if anyone was close behind you.
Here's a sorta-example, in between the two screens there's the characters, and these move left-to-right to indicate all characters' positions.
https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/Q-3qPtcC29E/maxresdefault.jpg