improve wals replay on secondary

Hey,
PG 9.6, I have a standalone configured. I tried to start up a secondary,
run standby clone (repmgr). The clone process took 3 hours and during that
time wals were generated(mostly because of the checkpoint_timeout). As a
result of that, when I start the secondary ,I see that the secondary keeps
getting the wals but I dont see any messages that indicate that the
secondary tried to replay the wals.
messages that i see :
receiving incremental file list
000000010000377B000000DE

sent 30 bytes  received 4.11M bytes  8.22M bytes/sec
total size is 4.15M  speedup is 1.01
2019-05-22 12:48:10 EEST  60942  LOG:  restored log file
"000000010000377B000000DE" from archive
2019-05-22 12:48:11 EEST db63311  FATAL:  the database system is starting up
2019-05-22 12:48:12 EEST db63313  FATAL:  the database system is starting
up

I was hoping to see the following messages (taken from a different machine)
:
2019-05-27 01:15:37 EDT  7428  LOG:  restartpoint starting: time
2019-05-27 01:16:18 EDT  7428  LOG:  restartpoint complete: wrote 406
buffers (0.2%); 1 transaction log file(s) added, 0 removed, 0 recycled;
write=41.390 s, sync=0.001 s, total=41.582 s; sync file
s=128, longest=0.000 s, average=0.000 s; distance=2005 kB, estimate=2699 kB
2019-05-27 01:16:18 EDT  7428  LOG:  recovery restart point at 4/D096C4F8

My primary settings(wals settings) :
wal_buffers = 16MB
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9
checkpoint_timeout = 30min

Any idea what can explain why the secondary doesnt replay the wals ?