I's normal that your servent starts as a leaf with a fresh configuraion: your public ip has no been validated, and there is no past proof of bandwidth and no past proof that your servent can accept incoming connections. Also, it needs to proove that your serven has a good past of connection availability.
The election mechanism needs several conditions before a node can become an UltraPeer. And even in that case, the promoion will only occur if you get replies from the network that more ultrapeers are needed. Of course this will only happen provided that Ultrapeer support is not disabled.
When you stop your servent, some statistics are computed and stored, and benefit to the next restart (the delay before resarting is taken into account to compute your host availability).