If it's always returning to this value, I suspect this is related to the broken state saving with SU4 that you may have seen others complaining about. Unfortunately, there isn't anything I can do about this, except pressure Asobo to look into this issue for SU5.
In the meantime, there is currently a discussion on the official forums about a workaround with how you exit the simulator. That might be worth a try. Also, have you tried editing the state.cfg? I think others have had luck setting any values in there as they like.