Finally I went back into the Channel Palette and selected the Index channel. Once again I take the magic wand tool and carefully selected the light gray racer silhuoette in the background along with all the other pieces of debris around the it. Then going back into the layers palette, inveresed the selection and created a Quick Mask in Blur Layer 3 and set the layer opacity to 43% - this keeps some of the purple racer details intact. I've done the same thing to Blur Layer 2 but this time the selection includes the explosion along with the racecraft and the Opacity is kept at 100% - this masking preserves the lightly blurred details of the explosion.