The best racing games like Mario Kart Wii are Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Kart 64 and Crash Team Racing. Below are 8, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to racing costs you.
Filtering to racing means you want the vehicle to be the subject. It is the right filter when what you liked was speed, or handling, or a road worth driving.
What you get: A short session that is complete in itself. A race is over in five minutes and you can always take the corner better.
What made Mario Kart Wii worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the racing part of that answer, and only the racing part.
The definitive entry — 96 tracks, anti-gravity, and online that works.
Battle mode is the reason, and the nostalgia is real.
The kart racer with the highest skill ceiling, and it is enormous.
Karts, hovercraft and planes, with an actual adventure mode.
The best non-Nintendo kart racer, and the track design is superb.
Two characters per kart, and the most distinctive entry.
Kart racing built around team play rather than individual placing.
For racing with no items at all, and no forgiveness.
Everything outside the vehicle. Racing games rarely have a story, and the ones that try usually should not have.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Mario Kart Wii that are not racing games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Mario Kart Wii — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The definitive entry — 96 tracks, anti-gravity, and online that works.
No. Mario Kart Wii released on the Nintendo Wii, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Simulation models tyre temperature, fuel and weight transfer and punishes you for ignoring them. Arcade gives you grip, boost and a rewind, and is about flow. Buying the wrong one is where most disappointment comes from.
For the simulation picks it changes the game completely. For anything arcade it makes almost no difference.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Mario Kart Wii list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is racing — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the racing guide for where to start in the genre generally.