This affected me a couple of years ago while living in Spain and crossing the UK border about once every two months. Fortunately I passed the Auto Overseas Residence test No1 as I was not in the UK for more than 14 days. If you look at the HMRC it defines Cross Border Trips as:
Begin in the UK.
End in the UK.
Begin and End in the UK.
Your Cross Border Trips neither begin nor end in the UK. This could just be a matter of semantics but it seems to exclude transit stops.
WM.