(Long post; if you just wanna see the strat, watch the first video.)

(You should probably ignore the timer in the video; see the timings below.)

Seeing as our current strategy for the mission "Pay Ray" is very RNG heavy in more ways than one (making it very inconsistent) I decided to try and find something else we could do to make the $1500 as quick as possible.

A couple of days ago, tduva brought up the fact he ran through a donut stall to get into a "mini-game"/side-mission (which isn't on the map), where if you lose the cops you get some cash, and when he did it in 2006 he got a lot of money, but said that obviously wouldn't be very useful when we need it in 1978. Then I remembered that there are ones in 1978, and they unlock at the same time as the rest of the side-missions (I'm pretty sure the cutscene for Pay Ray even mentions there are side-missions that aren't on the map). I then remembered there is one of these very close to your Hunts Point garage, and this strat was born.

What you have to do is get a bike before "Pay Ray" (as you would usually try to do as we usually use one for that mission). If you get it the mission prior, store it in your garage, if you got it before that, go into your garage and get the stored one.

After this you need to warp to Hunts Point (which I seemed to have more luck doing with the map; doing it through the garage messed up once and kept me in the same place even though it thought I was at Hunts Point I think).

Once you're outside the Hunts Point garage, drive towards where the stall is (see the video) and run into it, which will put your heat at the maximum and spawn some cop cars nearby, and then try to escape the cops as fast as possible (I find driving on the sidewalk helps lose them). If you do this really well, you will lose the cops quickly (after this keep driving to make sure they don't catch up again) you will get $2000 straight away (and sometimes an extra $10000 for perfect driving, but that was rare for me in testing). If you do it a little too slowly, it will give you less, but I never got less than $1000 when doing tests. If you wanted to continue the run you can just turn around and do the same thing again to get more, which is slower, but is still probably quicker (and more consistent) than the strat we were already using.

Once it gives you the money, you can then warp away as usual and complete the mission and then continue on. This sometimes seems to require you to warp to a garage to get the mission to spawn for some reason (this happens with the old strat too), so do that if needed.

Now the first thing that concerned me was cops and traffic RNG, but the cops always spawn in the same spots at the strat and my testing showed this to be very consistent.

For the timing, I timed from spawning at the garage until the game awarded me the money. You will have to add ~30 seconds onto this to compensate for the rest of what you need to do.

The first testing I did was from a new game. I did this 3 times and had a bike every time, and 2/3 of these times I got the $2000 quickly (under 1:00); the other time I only got $1000 but could've maybe gone back. The second testing I did was from doing the same thing over and over from a saved game (although I didn't purposefully reload it, I just kept warping back and trying again mostly). I did this 7 times and 5/7 of these times I got the $2000 quickly (under 1:00), one time I had to go back to get the extra $1000 (2:10) and the other time I got $1000 far away and felt like going back was not worth it.

So as you can probably guess, this strat seems very consistent, as long as you do the strat correctly, and can save a ton of time (my best split is ~2:00, which would save 0:30; my PB/WR is ~3:50, which would save over 2:00).

Now you're probably wondering about this "TAS" strat. In the first run I did from the start, I found out that knocking the stall over (which starts the mission) and the cops chasing you has a very small gap. This means if you could perfectly time losing a cop (which I got on the way there by accident) just after starting the mission but not spawning the others in, you will complete the mission straight away, getting you the $2000 and the perfect driver $10000 bonus too. Even though it was amazing at the time, it would probably only save ~17 seconds or so, so don't think it's worth looking into, but it sure was cool. See the video below for this amazing strat(!)