A couple of points you have touched on above, one always needs to know what track variant needs to be applied and to which times (sometimes the state of track/track variant gets to a point when even a track variant cannot be applied, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand why that happens).
When the winner crosses the finish line say for a 1400m race, we assume he has run the full distance of 1400m for that race.
Now if this same horse competed against the track record holder (Fixed Standard, not that one would use the Track record as the Fixed standard) say for arguments sake at Rosehill the standard is 81.38 secs you create a Track constant Time X distance = 113,932 we can then look back at say a recent winner on the 31st Dec. who won in 83.43 secs divide this into the track constant = 1,365.5mtrs so if i compare this winner to the fixed standard we can see the distance difference with this 1 crosshair (everything should be measured in distance completed, not time).
There are 3 crosshairs that are used then to define the ability matrix of a horse,fixed, relative and a moving standard once these are defined we then can look at sectionals and then construct how how each race may unfold.

But then again all this is getting complicated, just stick with what your already doing.