Dependence of the Alfvén radius on the wind magnetisation, and the time-evolution of the Sun’s wind braking torque. Left: Longitudinally averaged Alfvén radii shown with large markers coloured by the monthly sunspot number. The solid red line is the fit to those points. The dashed and dotted lines compare the predicted scaling based on 2.5D wind simulations from Finley & Matt (2018) and Hazra et al. (2021), respectively. The hourly Alfvén radii from each encounter are scattered in the background with the corresponding colour. Right: Same as Fig. 3 but now for the solar wind angular momentum-loss rate.