For those of us who read this page on a daily basis, Ford performance cars, just make sense. We get the idea of high horsepower, blistering track times, and the opportunity to stick it to the guy in the other lane driving a different brand at the track. According to Ford though, performance cars may also make financial sense. We’d like to add to that, as enthusiasts, we may be entering a perfect storm of Ford performance vehicles, not seen since our parent’s or grandparent’s youths.

In an article recently published by The Motley Fool, they discuss several reasons for Ford heading in the performance direction. One of the keys here is that performance vehicle sales are up 70-percent in the USA and 14-percent in Europe and China. While many Europeans have always enjoyed Ford’s performance models, it’s the emerging Chinese market that has the potential to be huge. It’s there that the Focus ST is leading the charge as Ford’s performance vehicle, and the Mustang will be soon to follow.

This global consumption of Ford’s performance vehicles, combined with the unifying of all the company’s performance and parts divisions under the Ford Performance banner, is nothing but good news for consumers. While the 2015 Mustang has its share of detractors over the car’s looks, the appetite for performance oriented cars globally, is, something we should cheer about. This ensures that Ford’s plan to introduce 12 new performance models over the next five years, stays in place. It also further secures the pony car’s future, and brings in a whole new wave of enthusiasts.

We’ve been hearing rumors as well that Ford is about to launch another halo car, a follow up to the Ford GT, which bowed out back in 2006 due to changing federal crash standards. The old GT has a front end height too low to be built today. We suspect Ford will be bringing something clean sheet to the table rather than a jacked up version of the GT. Regardless, a supercar that could be sold globally, is yet another good thing. While production may be limited, the release of such a car, and its sale globally, allows for more units, and provides better support of the business model of continuing to produce such a vehicle.

Here in the USA, and likely around the globe as well, there’s yet another factor, that was unknown until just the last few weeks. The global oil market has become fiercely competitive since 2008. Brazil, Russia, China, Iran, and even the USA, are producing more oil than ever before. The result has been gas prices falling slowly over the past few months. Now the guys at OPEC have decided to basically keep the market flooded, in an effort to drown out their competitors. The end result is a glut of supply on the market, causing oil prices to fall to near pre-2001 levels, and they could fall back to late 1990s levels, as OPEC continues to maintain high production, in an effort to gain back their dominance of the market, the Saudi oil minister has said aren’t backing off, no matter what the price falls to.

That all translates into cheap gasoline for American consumers. Cheap gasoline at the pump does a couple of things. It makes a performance car like the Mustang that much more affordable to drive every day. It also leaves all of us with extra cash in our pockets, which translates into disposable income for things like performance cars, and performance parts.

We’ll go out on a limb here and say, given modern performance technology, and the availability of cheap fuel once again, things might be getting better than they’ve been in quite some time for performance enthusiasts. By quite some time, we mean 50 years, back to the first muscle car era. If you thought we’d hit the plateau of performance and power, it might be time to rethink that, as fuel becomes less expensive, enthusiasts have more money in their pockets, and the blue oval brings in more performance models. Could this be the rebirth of the Total Performance era? It certainly is an exciting proposition -or is it too good to be true?