Although it was mostly new people, the director is the same as the original, arguably “the father of F-Zero”.
There’s been some interviews with him:
Since he wasn’t involved in F-Zero X, I get the impression he basically just ignored it completely when they were making the GBA entry. It’s unclear if he worked on the BS F-Zero stuff, but that game had some weird looking vehicles like MV. It’s as if MV followed it’s trajectory (also i’m sure this was due in part to the GBA hardware limitations basically necessitating a SNES-like game).
Then afterwards, he was only credited as Special Thanks on GP Legend, and none of the others in the series, and Nintendo pushed on with the X/GX characters etc. So MV comes off as like this ‘off brand’ F-Zero when you look at them all, but really it’s probably closer to the original creator’s vision than the 3D and later GBA games.