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chillibowl, it's easy to think that Pirelli will have the data, but in reality they are starting with a blank canvas this year. Downforce has been increased, tyres are considerably wider and the contact patch is correspondingly greater. In addition, they have been mandated to make the tyres behave in a different way from the past. And they let the world know last year during the testing conducted with the three teams that the amount of downforce that the mule cars were producing as great as they expected this year's cars to produce.
Again, with the wet tyres, they were instructed to make them behave differently, and their only chance to really do any serious testing was thwarted when Vettel crashed on an installation lap, and the test was aborted.
The major problem is that, even disregarding a complete overhaul of the rules for the cars such as this year, the cars are constantly evolving throughout the cycle of stable rules. As such, in my opinion, any tyre manufacturer is going to be constantly playing catch-up with the teams, and until each race - let alone the start of a new season - the tyre supplier isn't really going to know how their product is going to behave. They will have a fair idea, but so many different conditions will influence what happens on the day - air temp, track temp, wet, moist, humid, dry, and so on. And that's before we even consider how each team run their cars, what toe in, what camber, what starting temp, what amount of heat that they can generate when in racing conditions, etc.
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